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Thoughts of a One-Night Model Laid Bare As a child, I spent summers with my family at a nudist hot springs. There I absorbed many important life lessons. I experienced the sort of sunburn that left just one comfortable position: standing. I saw first-hand the utility of the fanny pack. And I learned that when you’re around a bunch of naked people walking their dogs and playing gin rummy, nudity quickly ceases to shock. After all these years, would I still feel so cavalier about public nudity? The New York Academy of Art on Franklin Street, in Tribeca, the country’s only graduate school of art devoted to the human figure, provided an opportunity to find out. They took me up on my offer to be a model for a night. It wasn’t until I started telling people about my upcoming gig that the fear set in. “You’re so brave,” my friends said. The more they said it, the more self-conscious I felt. I began obsessively grooming and exercising. I pre-planned my poses for minimum exposure. Maybe I would lie on my stomach. Or crouch, hysterically. A few days before the class, I broke out in nervous hives from head to foot. As I lay awake at night, itching furiously, I envisioned paintings of a cowering, Gollum-like creature covered in red welts. I was to model for “Light Effect Figure Painting,” a continuing education course teaching the “effects of light on form.” When I arrived on the appointed evening, teacher Dan Thompson assured me the paintings would essentially be large blobs of color. This was heartening. “We’re basically looking for as broad a swathe of skin as possible,” Thompson added. He suggested that my first pose be standing, foiling my plans to assume the fetal position. Two stages, each surrounded by a half-circle of easels, faced each other across the room. They were draped in orange, purple, yellow and blue fabric and lit by colored floodlights. A slender, confident-looking model climbed on stage, bathed in cool blue light. My floodlight was pink. With the colored backdrops, it looked like a cabaret set. I climbed up, and, with no other option, dropped my robe. Standing there awkwardly in a room full of clothed people, I tried to convince myself this was all perfectly normal, like going for an annual checkup. Then Thompson’s comments on the attributes of a good model raced through my head. “Someone who takes a pose that has spirit to it,” he’d said, “who falls into something that inspires them.” My first attempt resembled someone being followed down a dark street late at night. Arms clenched to my sides, I looked stiffly back over one shoulder, focusing on a white paint splotch on the floor to avoid the students’ gaze. This was a choice I almost immediately regretted. Not only was the paint splotch deeply uninteresting, but my head was at such an angle that before long, I felt a searing pain running from my neck down to my foot. (This discomfort, however, had the happy effect of distracting me from my state of undress.) The teacher paced the room during the 20-minute pose, commenting on the paintings. “You need to move those leg shapes up,” he said to an older gentleman wearing tortoiseshell glasses and iPod headphones. The man stood back, held up a paintbrush and squinted at me, apparently measuring my leg shapes. After a number of these detached, technical comments—concerning the angle of an elbow, the color of a shadow—I actually started to relax. As the palette knives went scrape scrape scrape, I slowly realized that I could just as easily have been a bowl of fruit or a dead rabbit. The students weren’t judging my love handles any more than they would the pitted skin of an orange. At the break, I donned my robe and walked around the room. The paintings were indeed mainly blobs of color, but a recognizable shape emerged from some. A few were beautiful. For my next pose, I stood more comfortably, as if waiting in line. The ache in my neck was gone, the pink light warmed my bare shoulders. And suddenly it felt like no big deal. Just like when I was a kid.
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