Years ago, my husband and I would spend our Thursday nights at Open Drawing. This is where you pay a small fee and sit with other artists and have a model (usually nude) in the middle of the room and for a couple hours you can draw, without instruction in your own style and at your own pace. It is a very quiet and proper place, for obvious reasons. My mom would take the kids for a couple hours. We would stop at Starbucks and try to get there early so we could pick a good spot and get easels next to each other in the back of the room. I’m claustrophobic and don’t like feeling trapped between people. We loved going. It was our little bit of time alone each week.
I took these opportunities to draw very seriously. I wasn’t in school anymore, and I loved having live models to draw from. My husband, Mike, however wasn’t as serious as I was. He is a very talented and capable artist, but would become impatient when having to draw for a long stretch. There were times where the model would hold the same pose for 2 hours with only a couple breaks in between. Mike would look for every reason to get me in trouble. I remember one of the first classes we attended. I had been concentrating on finishing before our session ran out. I looked over at Mike’s drawing and he had a complete figure minus the head. There was a soldier he had drawn on the side of the paper throwing a grenade. Where the head of the model should be was instead smoke rising up and ashes. I, of course, was taken by surprise and started laughing. I had to leave the room. Everyone was giving me nasty looks and the model didn’t look happy. I was horrified. That was just the start. From then on, Mike would go out of his way to try and make me laugh while sitting in a completely quiet room with other very skilled artist. He would do this in a way that would leave me looking like an asshole as he would immediately go back to work, very seriously like nothing had happened. I don’t think we have a lot of the drawings anymore, but I found these last week when I was digging for paper in our giant stack of drawings in the basement. Thought it would be fun to share.
