Posing naked

Twenty pairs of eyes, all staring at my naked body, all desperately searching for something inspiring, a spark to ignite their work. One by one they begin to dab onto their canvases, art in the making.

There are only three men in the class. You could feel their disappointment when the nude model turned out to be me. The women weren’t that enthused either, even the pensioners from the U3A class seem to have expected something better. I’m used to their disappointment, which soon passes, they are, at the end of the day artists, not voyeurs. I’m a nude model, not a pole dancer.

The room feels cold when you’re naked, even in summer it takes a few minutes to adjust to being without clothes. Just as well, it’s immediately after stripping off that you’re most at risk of that unwanted erection and the cold provides the necessary shiver to keep me shrivelled.

When I started nude modelling it was the thing I worried about most. Yes I wanted to test myself, push myself by facing my fears, like a child venturing out in pure darkness, but I didn’t want that experience to include exposing an unwanted stiffy to a group of giggling girls and grannies. I was stupid of course, it happened once, the third time I posed, and nobody cared, it was just something else to paint, like a geranium added to a vase of roses, a green wheelbarrow inserted into a garden scene. “I’ve not seen one of those for years,” an old woman said to me at the end, with a crook-toothed smile.

I sit back and relax, trying to keep as still as I can. This is the bit I enjoy, so rare is it for me to sit and do absolutely nothing. Usually I’m at the computer, watching TV, reading a book, listening to music or a babbling radio DJ, maybe even writing. On the train sometimes I do put down my book and just stare out of the window, but even then the world is putting on a performance for me, landscape rushing by at the speed of a diesel engine.

To sit and do nothing is a long-forgotten pleasure, something our parents or grandparents did, like snaring rabbits, catching newts or battling Hitler, somehow not relevant today.
You need to stay awake for nude modelling, it’s not as easy as it sounds when you can‘t move, let alone read a book. I keep alert by people watching, turning the people I see into characters in a story, imagining their lives, their loves. That girl for instance, one of the young students, barely twenty, her hair like a hedgehog’s, just starting to grow back after being shawn off.

It could be a symbol of the girl’s rebellion, a fashion statement, even something she did for work, a lot of art students make spare cash through acting or modelling. But I imagine her as a young cancer victim, a young survivor now. I take in her body, in a not dissimilar way to which she is taking in mine. I am manipulating it into a story, she is thin as a stick, so I weave that into the story, she’s shed three stone because of the therapy, the chemo diet. The disfiguring podge that plagued her teenage years helped to save her life.

Slowly, in my mind, I shape and mould her into the canvas of a tale. The terror at discovering the lump, the tears at impending death, the pain, the baffling medical science, the kindly nurse, the hope, the black cloud of doom, the betting shop calculations: a 62% chance of survival, 23% chance of remission, why would gods play dice when a game of cancer is such fun.

At the end of the session I will whip out my laptop and turn her into words, a fictional version of the girl I see before me, creating new life frankensteinly from what I witness around me.

Then, with the story finally put to paper, it’s time to put my clothes back on. It’s really unfortunate that I can only write in the nude, it’s why I got turned down for the writer in residence job at Heathrow Airport, “At least Tony Parson’s doesn’t get his cock out,” they said.