Life Drawing Life

My dad has a complicated relationship to art.

 I found a 3 x 5’ canvas in the shed, behind the broken tiller, dirt dauber nests in the corners of the wooden frame. The painting was abstract, a riotous, surrealist piece in muted pastels of my doodles. I knew it was my dad’s work because they were the same doodles he sketched on scratch paper when he was on the phone, the same curlicue faces with big eyes and whimsical smiles that he drew during church on the bulletins. Loops and tunnels and twisting eels of color all pulsing across the canvas.

“That old thing!” he said and turned back to the computer. 

“Did you paint it when you lived in New Orleans, Dad? Did you paint it when you had long hair and rode your bike to work? Did you paint it when you were a hippie?” (I had just learned that word in Bible school. We were painting figurines of praying hands and wearing trashbag smocks to keep or dresses clean, when Missy--I hated her--tied a paint cloth around her head, and said, “Look, I’m a hippie!”) 

You shrugged me off then, but, Dad, I can ask better questions now: Were you tripping when you painted it and though for sure you’d understood the mysteries of the multiverse? Was this painting a Robert Mapplethorpe moment of artistic revelation?

Anyway, the next time I was rooting around in the shed behind the tiller and the extra woodstove, I found the canvas painted over, only the faintest outlines of the curlicues and smiles under a coat of white house paint. 

Why did you erase your art, Dad? 

I should’ve learned from this that paintings were not safe in the shed at Sunset Pines. I should’ve known better, but I stored the larger than life nude (of myself) that Andy gave me as a thank you for being her model for her senior project: eight huge naked paintings of me that were displayed prominently across campus with clipboard for the audience to comment on. The most memorable comment was elicited by “Eve,” the painting that ended up in my Dad’s shed. Someone wrote: “I’m going to go back to my dorm and masturbate now.”

At that time I lived alone in a studio apartment just a few blocks from campus. It was a converted garage and right next to a daycare. The painting “Eve” took up a whole wall of my livingroom/ bedroom, making it awkward when people came over. It was like they weren’t sure where to look. Me--naked and larger than life--loomed over all conversations. In the painting, I’ not totally naked; I’m wearing a tie. The tie has scales on it, and represents the Snake. I’m defiantly holding out a platter with a curving rib on it. My eyes glare: Take your fucking rib back, man. 

In the shed, Eve faced the wall. Dirt daubers built in the corners of the wooden frame. A few years later, Eve moved from inside the shed to outside under the covered awning with the trash bins and Maple’s dog-a-loo. Constellations of mold speckled the back of the canvas. My boys were little at the time. It didn’t seem feasible (or appropriate) to bring her to our townhouse. I knocked a few clumps of mud off the back, pulled her back away from the wall. She still glared defiantly, her extended arm solid and untiring. “Sorry, girl,” I whispered as William ran up and glued himself to my leg.

“What’s that, Mama?” he asked, but I distracted him with the goats. Maybe I can show him when he’s older. 

I’m not sure when dad cut the canvas from the frame (Did you keep your eyes averted?). He folded it over and over as bits of the green background flaked off and just one knee obscenely protruded. Eve went into a trash bag and into a trash bin and eventually to the county dump. The wide frame was chopped up and added to the burn pile.

My dad silently destroyed the evidence that he could of my short stint as a nude model. We’ve never talked about it.

My dad vehemently opposed my nude modeling for the art department’s figure drawing class at my college. I forget how he found out I was modeling though the most likely scenario is that I told him myself. I probably told him because I knew he would disapprove, and at seventeen I very much loved doing things my dad disapproved of. Disappointingly, there wasn’t much of a fight. He told me he disapproved, asked me to stop, and I said I was going to keep modeling. It paid good money, but that wasn’t the main reason.

When modeling for the figure drawing class, I felt that I was cocooned in something bigger than myself. The room was warm, the lights low. I always sat on something soft. The only sounds were the students’ charcoal scratching on the newsprint, and, occasionally, the professor’s whispered comment. A ring of easels stood between me and the art student, and I felt safe. I basked in their appreciation. They praised me for how still I could be, for how long I help a pose, for never complaining. I slowed my breathing; I meditated. Occasionally my stomach growled, and that was embarrassing. 

Dad called the college and inquired if they knew there was an underage student modeling for the art department’s figure drawing class. I was furious. Now, I realize he was trying to protect me. I had only been out of the mental institution for a few months and was still a little unsteady. When I turned 18, I started modeling again. 

I liked the vulnerability of it. It took some courage to be naked in front of people, and it also took courage to draw and have others see your work. Life drawing helps us see more clearly that we are all more alike than different. Drawing something--a person, a flower, your cuddly French bulldog--is an act of honoring it. (I read and reread Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing by Frederick Franck.)

When I was a junior, I took Life Drawing, and the art department found other models. My older brother modeled a few times. I focused on his hands. He told me later he was afraid of getting an erection, and he had to think of sad, terrible things. One time he was drunk and passed out and slept the whole class. I drew his feet, stained with mulberries from walking barefoot across campus, mud on his legs from the little camp where he was living on the banks of the Caddo River. He lay sleeping in front of us, less than six feet from me, but we felt universes apart, and I was relieved when he didn’t show up the next week . We got a new model. 

I modeled for a community group that my professor started. These artists were older, their work stronger, their eyes more refined. They sat close and talked to me while they were working. I missed the protective circle of easels. One evening as I slipped out of my robe, I felt heat in their eyes, and I suddenly felt the uncomfortable feeling I always get at the gynecologist. Sweat slipped down my arms. I never modeled again after that. But I didn’t tell my dad that I had stopped. 

I made my own decision in my own time. I didn’t tell him; he didn’t ask. There are a lot of subjects we don’t talk about. Art is one of them.