Kidogo & The Life Drawing Class

Floorboards: old, dusty, the white gravel/sand from outside has trodden its way in. Nobody in here speaks and the silence is meditative, broken only by the scritch-scratch of pencils, crayons, charcoal scampering across the textured pages of people’s sketch pads.

The walls are adorned with black and white drawings and Ella, our model, lies in repose in the room's centre. She is beautiful. The has long golden hair that catches the light, fanning from her crown in disarray. Her eyebrows are dark and expressive, framing her long dark lashes and arching towards each other above her delicate little snub nose. Her lips are a deep rose that is echoed in her areolae. The light rests on her skin, allowing the encroachment of soft shadows over her stomach, onto her thighs, between her fingers and around the flare of her nostrils. An orange ring sparks with a bright point of brilliance, as though it is the true light source of the room.

She is delicate, quiet, relaxed, and her childish charm is belied by the unruly scrawl of curls at her apex, by the peaks of her rose nipples, and by the sensual dip of her bellybutton that adorns a belly in the mounded shape of a woman. She must still be innocent but in the red orange fire of one artist’s rendition of her sleeping shape, the stirrings of her sexuality are reflected. It is the light that draws the eye again and again, her position in the centre of the room makes it seem to radiate from her. She is so still that she must surely be sleeping – and the trust that shows underpins her innocence.

There are ten of us in the room other than Ella. Each person wears a look of engrossed concentration on their face. Old, weathered hands and young, delicate ones trace her curves in their own style of worship of her form. Some take broad sweeping strokes that counteract the quick, manic twitch of the smaller sketches. My own lines are tiny little hasps of noise and together, all the lines being strung across the pages sound like a symphony. The larger drawings are the trombones, the booming drums, the double bass, while the smaller scratches are the violins, the cymbals, the triangles.

Outside the waves pound out their endless rhythm, a sound that has been the same since before humans – before anything – walked the earth. At the back of the room stand the easels, like little three-legged creatures standing at the ready, as though they are waiting to be taken for a walk. Those whose strings are not pulled tight have a somewhat forlorn look.

The mood of the room is companionable. Everyone is in their own world until now and then someone’s world breaks over into the room as they fill in shadows, rustle in a tin for pencils, or change their position in search of better comfort. Still nobody speaks. People’s heads nod up and down as thy glance at the naked girl like little lemurs popping out of the ground (or like the musicians of our symphony bowing their heads to the lure of their bows). Nobody realises it looks like a dance. People’s whole bodies move when they draw, erase, appraise their work sometimes with a sigh and a frown.

This is the final pose and the mood seems to be changing, more urgent, the symphony claiming its unknowing musicians in a building crescendo. The heads nod up and down faster, lines are more erratic and erasures more insistent. Ella is still the calm centre of this building climax. As the end of the pose approaches the symphony falls apart while each person strives for his or her own conclusion to the piece; the timekeeper announces “four minutes”. A woman in red tiptoes to the edge of the room to change her instrument – she has three minutes let. A man working in orange and yellow crayon pauses, knowing he will run out of time, before picking up and trying to finish anyway. Ella clears her throat.

Heads nod, waves crash, crayons scrape across board, the timekeeper says “one minute” and some people begin to pack away while others take on the dogmatic determination of a student finishing an examination. Paper rasps against paper, some artists still bob their heads and scramble to finish, and the beeper sounds.

Now the symphony is over, the ending rushed, the musicians as they each emerge from their own world showing varying degrees of satisfaction in their work.

Ella stands, puts on her purple underwear, her blue jeans, her red woollen jumper, and moves around the room to quietly survey the art while the artists clear away the tools of their trade.

The magic is broken, the symphony has fallen silent, and the audience/artists begin to speak as they file through the exit. When they are all gone, the light that graced the naked girl with its caresses finally retreats from the room and the corners yield to darkness.