Gotham Digest
The first man I ever saw naked was named Wendell. He was about fifty years old, had the chest of a grizzly bear, and graying dreads all the way down his back. I drew him seventeen times in one hour.
Drawing a nude model is not unlike love: nothing will ever be as good as your first crack at it, and certainly nothing will make as profound an impression. Although I will never match my experience with Wendell, I’ve since found a new sort of love, and a new group of naked people, at the Project of the Living Artist down on Bushwick Ave.
The studio door is propped open with a folding chair and inside it smells like cat pee. Yes, this is the smell of both art and love: cat pee. There’s a regular crowd of about six artists ranging in age from twenty to (I’m guessing here because it seemed impolite to ask) eighty?
Joe Catuccio runs the place, and has done so for forty years. Joe has a beard. Joe wears a t-shirt he made with puffy paint that says “People are born with two hands so they can spend their lives applauding themselves.” Joe has many, many cats.
The model shows up and apologizes for her lateness in Russian. She is filling in for the normal model, a pretty, chain-smoking, Icelandic lady with a foul mouth and a gorgeous body. I have drawn her before—she strikes poses reminiscent of Amazonian warriors.
This woman is older, and shy about talking. She gestures to her mouth with embarrassment when all that comes out is Russian. Joe shakes the egg timer we use to measure pose length, and it rattles, broken. He throws it behind him into a pile of other rubble: two fake Christmas trees, an empty cookie packet, some oil paints.
“We’ll just starts with some one-minute poses,” Joe says.
She disrobes, and it begins.
The model is a Russian ballet of one. She twists her wrists into birdlike shapes and even executes a dying swan position for one pose. The model is so still that sometime one of Joe’s many cats (Schabernake and Jatahampra are friendliest) will curl up beside her. We all scratch away at our papers-incorporating the cat into the crook of her elbow.
You bring your own supplies to the Project, so everyone works in different media. I have a children’s easel pad and some woodless pencils, while the kid next to me has a sketchbook and charcoal. Joe’s got a box filled with every which thing: markers, paint, glitter, you name it.
When someone calls the Project, everyone listens to Joe’s voice on the outgoing message. “Absolutely no instruction guaranteed,” he says. It’s true. This is not a drawing class, but rather a place for people to get together and flex their artistic muscles. To stretch and exercise. We don’t even really look at each other’s work—what we do do is talk.
“Joe,” one woman says, “Should you really keep those there?”
She gestures at a samovar full of dead batteries sitting next to the wood-burning stove. Joe keeps it burning to makes sure both his artists and his models are warm. Joe shrugs. “Why not? It’s better than sticking them in a landfill isn’t it?”
This leads to a discussion about recycling, which leads to fuel efficiency, which leads to Willie Nelson’s vegetable oil powered car. All the while, we are shading the model’s collarbone in our sketches.
“What if all the deep-fry oil McDonald’s produces was donated to power American SUV’s?” someone suggests.
“It still wouldn’t be enough.” We all nod sadly. The model stretches, and puts on her bathrobe.
This pose is finished. We stretch and flip the pages of our sketchbooks. The poses work like running sprints. The first twenty minutes are a series of twenty, one-minute poses. We then do four, five-minute poses, two ten minute poses and so on. It’s a way to get loosened up, and familiarized with the model’s body before moving on to extended, half-hour or hour-long poses.
Joe’s oldest cat, Ragfoot, is mostly bones and fur. He lies on a drawing horse and idly bats at bits of pencil and gum eraser his sleep. Decrepit though he is, Ragfoot knows when the session is over. Like sphinx, he opens his eyes and walks to his food dish. It is two-o’clock. The session is over, and it’s time to be fed.
The Project is an amazing resource for artists—although live models are expensive, the ten-dollar cover at the studio will buy you three and a half hours of drawing time. It’s an amazing deal, though I’m not sure that’s why we all go. I think that if, tomorrow, Joe said he was converting the studio into a poker club, we’d all show up the following Saturday, ready for a game. Something about the communal vibe of the space and the easy conversation between people is comforting. We are there for the naked people, yes, but also there for the art, the cat pee, and the love.
Open modeling sessions are held at the Project of the Living Artist every Saturday from 10:30 am to 2 pm. The studio is located at 30 Bushwick Ave. at Devoe St. The cost is $10.