Just now it's hard to be in Nepal. I've given myself a day away from everyone, in my friend's fancy apartment, so that I could relax, recuperate, and do some fun creative stuff. All that has happened is that I've given my mind the space to air all of the doubts and fears that I didn't have time to look at. I've committed to staying here for a long time, so I'm going to have to work it out one way or another, but at the moment I can't shake the feeling that I'm not the best person for this job, and at any rate, I should probably get on with making money rather than dwindling away what little I have on the comforts I seem to be increasingly needing. I look to facebook for comfort, and see friends who worked really hard at circus, and are now touring the world, doing amazing shows, and earning a nice living out of it, while I watch my skills fade away for want of training space, time, energy. But let me stop this self-pitying, cringeworthy, poor-me blog. I'll put up this thing I wrote a while back, about one of the jobs I had while I was living in Brisbane.
For a while now I’ve been meaning to put down some words about life modelling, something I’ve been doing a lot of. Each time I do it I come away with something, it is an amazing kind of school.
Yesterday I had to do a double – to pose with another model. I have done this only once before, and that other time it was a rushed thing, a distracted thing. There were so many external circumstances that it was just an incidental aspect of a bizarre life modelling session. This time, I knew in advance, and I was modelling with someone who I’d met only once before. She is one of the most experienced life models I know, having done it for at least 6 years and currently working 5 days a week at this curious job. She has a kind of introverted strength, a quiet confidence. She picked me up in her little car and she drove, and I talked. Soon we were finding our way up winding paths, through the crisp air and dense foliage of Mount Tambourine. The class itself was held in a church that was commonly used for weddings and functions, bright, but austere, and absolutely beautiful. On the way we talked a little about modelling, about how we might approach the evening. Mostly I model for university and TAFE courses. In those places there is a pervading air of concentration, a silence punctuated by the scribbling, scratching and sweeping strokes of the various mediums. A teacher either timidly offers encouragement and advice, or stalks as a predator, startling students with incisive criticism. This mount Tambourine group were so very unlike this. They are doing this class because they are old friends, and this is their way of catching up. They have been doing this for a long time. They are quick to express their appreciation of a challenging or interesting pose, and to rise to a challenge like old friends at a chess board. I felt very awkward posing with the other model. I had learned so much about holding my own body still in space, and now suddenly there was someone else who I’d never worked with before. Poses which should have been so simple were proving too difficult to hold. I’ve almost never come out of a pose early, but during this class I think it happened twice. Nonetheless they loved us, and plied us with food and wine, implored me to juggle, laughed along.
At some points, and it always happens, I experienced the power of the body-mind connection. In one pose I sat with my head in my hands, an image of mourning, while the other model leaned on my back sympathetically. After a few minutes of holding this pose I felt such a strong a sense of loss, of mourning. Imaginary figures dutifully ambled past me in single file, all of the things I had to mourn, lost friends, dead relatives, failed loves, poor old Suthy our pet dog. Cloudier, spectral shapes - I could only assume were the things which hadn’t happened yet, the things I was yet to mourn – they filed past too, at the end of my lonely little centrelink line. At the same time, the human warmth of the co-model, being supported in this pose gave me such a feeling of poignant hope, of how far I’ve come and grown through all of these times. Another pose involved us in a sweet embrace, innocent and warm despite our nudity. And I have never been attracted to that girl, nothing beyond appreciating her looks and charm in a distant sort of way, but after about ten minutes of creating that image with her, I developed an overwhelming feeling of being in love with her. It was nice at first, but I was glad to hear the timer go off, and be relieved of the feeling that my innermost emotions and thoughts were at the whim of some life drawing class. That such a genuine feeling of love could be created by holding a certain pose, made acutely aware that the mind is not a fortress but an open shed, that I’m utterly susceptible to the outside world, its forces, its wind. This lesson has been confronting me almost daily, in varying ways, for the last month or so. It is a many-headed beast, one of its heads is this idea, still half-formed in my mind, the notion that I was never fully in control of my emotions, most of the time I was merely suppressing them, and if I can relinquish this particular kind of control then I will be able to be a better performer, writer, liver. Or, I might just go completely mental.
One of the members of the group runs a gallery. He has a worldly, jaded sort of artist air which poorly conceals a very warm and friendly nature. I was discussing with him this thing about life modelling which really grinds my gears.
After many years of studying circus, I have learned where my strengths and weaknesses lie, how to improve, etc. It was a framework, something solid, a source of confidence, because I knew even if I wasn’t satisfied with my skill level, I had a map, I could get there. Life modelling laughs in the face of that, because despite sometimes feeling successful, sometimes feeling uninspired, sometimes feeling absolutely great or completely useless at it, there is almost no correlation between these feelings and the feedback I get. In fact, the feedback is always very positive, which I find strange because people talk about what they like in a male model, and I don’t have those things. I don’t have muscle definition, I don’t do strong caveman poses, I’m not angular, I’m really quite curvy, and I don’t have a lot of tan to draw tone from. Anyway, this guy in the group the other day, he gave me a nice insight on it. He said “You’re great to draw because you’re likeable”. Now, it’s nice to be told this, and I get told it a lot. Not trying to blow my own trumpet, but I do. And sometimes I feel annoyed about this, like being a nice guy is the consolation prize for not being a good artist, especially when so many wonderful artists I know would never be accused of being a friendly, likeable person. But he elaborated “you’re really comfortable up there when you’re modelling, and we can tell that you like yourself, and this makes you much easier to draw. We’ve had some models who had amazing bodies, but they just had so much attitude, and you could tell that they didn’t want to be there. It’s as though your eye doesn’t fall on them as easily, you feel like you’re being pushed away.” This resonated, it was part of that many-headed beast. This feeling of being there with the life-drawers, of bringing them in, it came from the fact that I didn’t care that much. I mean, I love life modelling and I always try and do a good job, but in a much different way to performance, where I’m anxious, and serious, and it’s important that I do well, and this show could be the big one where I get noticed, and all of that crap. During a clown workshop I discovered that when I don’t invest anything in the performance, when I’m beyond the point of caring, of wanting so much to be great at it, then I actually allow myself to show something special to the audience. And I looked at the other model, her peaceful, almost distracted air, and I appreciated why she was such a good model, why she gets more work than she can handle.
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