PAGE 40
Butch-femme
We stand on the podium not exactly back to back. I am tall, skinny, angular. She is smaller, softer. From my left shoulder to the floor, my side is touching her side. Her hair is whisping against my back. Our skins hover against each other, trembly, lightly touching then parting then touching. We are not at all still. I wonder whether the punters can see it. The dynamic.
At the end of the session Marilyn offers to email me details of other places I can get work. We exchange addresses, pulling on clothes behind the screen while also fumbling about for pens and bits of paper. I unbalance and knock into her. I catch her eye for longer than is necessary. She looks at me as though I’ve got two heads. There is real fear.
My bedsit has a whiff of decaying human. I think it’s my unwashed, dampish bedding. I have yet to open a window. Spring has been freezing.
With the synopsis now out of the house, the un-slept-in side of my double bed is covered with notes for poems, A4 sheets that shift and slide to the floor when I turn over in the night.
This week’s topic
40. Penniless artistes
U skint too? Is this the destiny of those of us who are determined to live by our creative vocations?
Click on the above to commiserate.
(And click here for all the discussions on life-drawing and Life to be found on this blog)
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1. In support of a penniless artiste – coincidentally a writer, like me – to whom I am very close, I’d like to advertise my manager Sue Vickerman‘s first novel SPECIAL NEEDS which is now on special offer in my shop. Or you can probably get it even cheaper off Amazon here. Download the kindle edition here. Read reviews here.
“A funny, page-turning read for the long winter nights…”
2. Life-models and strippers: poles apart?
Read this contentious newspaper article which asserts strippers and life-models are equivalent: each is an object because someone is paying her [sic] for a one-dimensional service. And the writer slates the feminists for moralising: …strip clubs no more make women into commodities than any other area of employment. We all work as a means to survive and, as such, during working hours we provide some service. By [feminist moralist] thinking, a teacher is just a commodity for the gratification of our desire to learn; a therapist a commodity to gratify our desire for mental comfort; a life-model simply an object for us to draw… etc. Read it here.
Now go look at photographer Bel’s response to this article, which includes one of her ‘art nude’ photographs.
Well? Art or porn?
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LISA ETHERINGTON attended Bournemouth Art School (England) in the mid ’sixties, then learned print-making in Bradford. Exhibitions include Bradford Open. She is a long-standing member of the Saturday People life-drawing group, Leeds (UK). Art for Lisa is a therapeutic hobby, and life-drawing a worthwhile discipline.
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