Chapter 11

Drawing from Life

 

The art students drifted in. They were all older than me, and looked sort of depressed. Among them was the chick who had spoken with me on the steps of the Art Institute. She didn’t appear to recognize me. I considered going over and greeting her, but she had this morose expression, as though somebody had just died. They all looked like that, and most of them had on black clothing. They sat on the stools and began adjusting their little drawing tables and unpacking their drawing materials.

After a while, the model came in. She had a sort of flat expression, bored to death looking, and straight hair that was between brown and blond. She was wearing a bathrobe. She stepped up onto the platform with the gorilla, untied the belt of her robe, sort of shrugged it off, and tossed it onto a chair. I had a moment of unreality. She was naked. She was completely bare. I had never seen a naked female before, and therefore it was interesting—but in itself, not. She was on the old side, maybe in her late twenties, and skinny, stringy, wobbly, and saggy all at once. Later, during the break, when all the art students were standing on the corner smoking cigarettes, I heard them talking about her. They said she had a complicated body and was hard to draw, therefore a good model. Apparently cute is easier to draw.

“Five-minute poses,” Arnold Zwieback said.

The model froze, one hand on the gorilla’s shoulder, and the drawers began to draw. I tried to draw the model and the gorilla too.

It took about thirty seconds for the discomfort of there being a naked woman in the room to wear off, and the discomfort of not being able to get the thick pencil Billy Zwieback had loaned me to do what I wanted to set in. Billy had also given me a big blue eraser, and I used it a lot.

Arnold Zwieback walked around among the drawing tables, smoking a cigar. He came up behind me, snatched the pencil out of my hand, and made some fast dark lines on my paper.

“Like that,” he said.

I didn’t understand what he meant. Then I sort of did. I was having trouble getting the whole figure on the page. My nude was sort of cut off above the knees, and my gorilla had a head too big for his body.

“Change,” Arnold Zweiback said.

The model grabbed a stool and kneeled on it with her arms around the gorilla’s neck. I flipped to a new page. This time I did slightly better, only the model looked like maybe a little bird sitting on the shoulder of King Kong.

“Change.”

This time she sank to the floor and lay at the gorilla’s feet. I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting this one right, so I just drew the woman, and the gorilla from the knees down. At the end of five minutes I actually had something better than I expected. What I had drawn might be a human. The gorilla legs were a failure, though.

After the break, we had a thirty-minute pose. I got everything on the paper, using my eraser a lot, and Arnold Zwieback came and made marks on my drawing twice. He also spoke to me.

“You seem to have a feeling for the gorilla.”

“Well, I’ve always liked them,” I said.

It was the hardest work I had ever done. Actually, I think it was the only work I had ever done. I was perspiring. I was concentrating. I also felt sort of embarrassed that my drawings were so stupid. I think I felt way more naked than the model. I got some comfort from glimpsing what the others were doing—most of their stuff stank too. I noticed the others made a point of not looking directly at anybody else’s drawing.

I understood now why they all looked depressed coming in.

Except this one guy. Blond guy. He was handsome, like Ralph Noble. He was drawing with a pen!

He drew standing up, with his arm extended, and it looked like he was conducting an orchestra. He drew the girl and the gorilla with these smooth, curving thick and thin lines, and he could do three beautiful drawings on one sheet of paper without any mistakes in five minutes. I wanted to be him.

“Okay! That’s all, folks,” Arnold Zwieback said.

“We’re here every day. Come back whenever you want. Meanwhile, draw from nature, draw still lifes, draw from imagination. Rome was not built in a day. Don’t get discouraged. Bye-bye.”