Just got time to fill you in on this week's work before jetting off to Barcelona... it's all art-related of course, so maybe I could count it as a legitimate business expense? Only joking.
So, Tuesday saw a new group but with an existing tutor - the inspirational one. I had to find a different building, but my directions got me to the door and the Reception very well and on time. Unfortunately there was no-one on Reception at that time in the evening, and I had no idea which room the class was in.
Eventually a passing artist with half-eaten plastic-wrapped sandwich in hand, took pity on me and escorted me down stairs and through double doors, endlessly and repeatedly it seemed, until we finally found a blue-floored white-painted aggressively-strip-lighted room in the bowels of the earth, where a group of people were setting up easels.
I was shown into the store room to change. It was markedly colder in there. I was taken to the tables at the front as soon as I stepped out, with a request that one of the students would like to take pictures of my back, if that was OK?
Fine. I assumed a curled up posture facing away from the camera on the hard table top (thoughtfully and tastefully decorated with a curtain, but no padding), but realised after a few flashes that the tutor was assuming I'd started and would stay still for the next hour... I broke my own rule and moved, just to get more comfortable for a long session.
Several of the students - a mixed bunch aged from twenties to well-retired - were working with a scratch crayon technique, whereby they have already covered a sheet of paper with crayon, dark shades over light, and they 'etch' the figure with sharp pointy tools. However this didn't seem to be compulsory, and one lad sat on the floor doing pencil sketches the whole way through.
The first pose, curled up with back view, was for half an hour, followed by a standing pose for twenty five minutes, then a break. A gentleman came up to introduce himself, he'd booked me for a different group later on in the year.
After the break I did a sitting pose on the edge of the table for almost an hour, with one stretch partway through. A fairly boring evening's work really. The tutor did very little too, sitting in a matching pose at the back of the room looking exhausted and letting them get on with it. Must have been a long day - I know she teaches the other group at 9.30 in the morning.
Mind you, I was half way through my gym routine at that time.
Thursday was Botticelli day. The village hall group were in the kitchen again, musing over their research material and early morning cups of coffee. They established that he used a very white tone and stylised poses and figures, and apparently I needed to put on at least a stone in weight - oh, and grow my hair down to the floor. They posed me as the famous 'Venus' painting, using a yellow sheet to stand in for the rather coy hairstyle - at least some parts of me were kept warm. One imaginative artist even managed a good approximation of a clam shell beneath my feet.
The evening session was warmer, at least. We covered much the same ground but with fewer and less confident students, and the tutor let me sit down for the second pose this time. Both sessions had begun with the ritual 'warm-up' poses of five to ten minutes each, drawing, but after that they were into paints of various sorts - watercolour, acrylic, or oils depending on taste or budget.
This morning was back to the college and a darkened room. All the lights were off and I was posed on a plastic chair set up on a table next to the window, looking out of it. The aim was to produce soft, smudgy, back-lit pictures. I stared at the overgrown bank and the busy road below. I noted hazel, elder and ivy, two squirrels, an orangey-brown wren and three other birds which looked like chaffinch, bluetit and dunnock, but they were moving quite fast. One ambulance passed by with sirens wailing, and a silver sports car parked in the only remaining space on the side of the road. A youngish woman got out. I ignored the rest of the traffic, but my old traveller's eye identified the standing dead wood and the angle of snap required to extricate it from the rest of the undergrowth.
The room was full of students and although I couldn't observe any of them directly, I was aware of their interactions behind me. The tutor made the rather flimsy floor shake each time he walked past the table. After the coffee break, during which I turned the heater on to 'high', I did a mirror image of the same pose, so as to get a matching crick on the other side of my neck. This time I observed a fluffy robin with blazing breast, who sat on a twig and watched me curiously for a while, and the return of one squirrel. The silver sports car drove off again.
I was particularly keen to get home early today, and was hoping there would be no work again this afternoon. I did ask about whether I'd be needed after the Easter break, and was told they'd look into it, but probably, almost definitely in fact. Finally I got my answer - next week there is a student who would like to use me for the afternoon session, for a particular project, but this week - I was free to go. Yay! Barcelona, here I come...
