Page 41

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Feb 132014
 

PAGE 41

Desperate Dan

Regarding the tradition of artists seducing their models, or models seducing the artists – whichever it is.

It happened.

With Conservative Jeremy. Gifted Jeremy of the Pent-Up Passion. Muscular, athletic, young, macho Jeremy-Of-Few-Words.

It was whisky. It was the Bonfire Party. He was up for it. A night on the hearthrug in front of his coal burner. He was sick halfway through.

Stupidly though, I got attached, due to that girl thing of thinking sex is meaningful. And he hated me for that, so didn’t employ me again.

In the morning when we woke up he pulled me back on top of him. He definitely did want me.

Subject

Hold out your pencil and look at me,
measure angles, how my thigh hangs,
white shins, rib-bones, nipples,
rippled stomach, this patch of scrappy hair,
but do not adjust my pose using your hands
or ask after my other life, or offer your
home-made flapjack, nor expect me to like
your artwork, nor to smile at you
or blush instead of looking straight back.

You fetch a palette thick with paint and
knife it on, eyes flicking up from the canvas,
eyes that clunk and lock with mine like
machine parts then disengage
as you score into it.


This week’s topic

41. Suki the actor
Is life-modelling a performance?
The above topic-heading is the start of my four-episode discussion: IS LIFE-MODELLING PERFORMANCE ART?

Feel free to comment there, too, on this week’s page of my serial. Agony aunts and uncles welcome. Or about my poem, from my poetry collection KUNST which is themed on the artist-model relationship and illustrated with sketches by fifteen artists. Read the reviews here. Buy it for £4.99 here.
KUNST cover

You may peruse and add comments to my other discussions here.

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Noticeboard

1. Not a notice, just a comment to try and get sympathy:
It is February in my real life, although in my serial, summer is about to arrive (see the next episode: page 42). Here in the grim north of England I have a rough, tough life, taking my clothes off in mid-winter, typically in semi-derelict, unheatable woollen mills. These are the main studio spaces that skint artists in this downtrodden, post-industrial region can afford to rent.

2. Are you, too, freezing in your bunkers and wazzed off with life? Come! Meet me at midnight in my absolute favourite Bradford caff, the phenomenal LAHORE CAFE BAR which serves lattes and astonishing cakes until the early hours of the morning in rooms – reached by spiral staircases – called ‘The Boudoir’ and ‘the Glamour Room’. It’s a no-alcohol cafe, what with catering to Muslim students (it’s near the university). They compensate for the lack of this drug by offering incredible sugar-fixes. And curries, obviously.
Here is the massive slice of Red Velvet Cake I shared with Bel. Dear Readers, WHY don’t you live in Bradford?
LAHORE red velvet cake

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Artist of the week

SANDRA COWPER did a degree in Art as a mature student at Wakefield College and Bretton College in Yorkshire (UK), combining her love of painting and sculpture. Now retired, she has more freedom to concentrate on life-drawing and painting and belongs to the (welcoming to newcomers) life-drawing salon which gathers at Redbrick Mill, Batley in Yorkshire (click here for full details: scroll to Batley). See some of Sandra’s work on renowned Redbrick artist Tom Wood‘s famous blog.
Sandra says, “I am always surprised at the paintings I produce and often don’t know how they have arrived. I am now in my sixth decade and I firmly believe that this is the right time for me – everything has come together rather like a cosmic alignment which could not have happened at any other moment in time.”

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