Lay Figures by Mark Blagrave

Author:Mark Blagrave
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nimbus
Published: 2020-09-21T14:46:14+00:00

NINE

Spring 1940

Frank had not spoken for twenty minutes. I couldn’t stand the silence any longer. Silence is different when you don’t have any clothes on. And different again when you are naked outdoors. I was not sure he understood those things.

“What am I today? Mainly geometry? Light and shadow?”

“Does it have to be one or the other?”

He had not gone deaf at least. And I was pleased that he had taken my question seriously, answered as if it were a legitimate thing to ask. From the first day he painted me nude, I had been a sponge for everything he could tell me about how he painted the figure, and he obviously had come to take it for granted that I had absorbed it all. Not that I had been remarkably quick on the uptake at first. My appreciation of what he told me had waxed and waned wildly several times as I tried to sort out the distinctions between the roles of lover and model.

His asking me to model without my clothes had been a significant hurdle for me to get over. What did it mean when the man who had told you that he never painted his lovers in the nude asked you to pose in the nude? Was the love affair over? Or was the “rule” just something he had said to get me into bed in the first place? I didn’t ask. I had simply nodded and unbuttoned. And, right away, he began to explain to me how he worked.

Some women might have been horrified to hear how they were being seen so technically, reduced to planes and angles, light and shadow. I found it reassuring. When he looked at my body in the studio, he looked one way. In the bedroom, another. The two were different, I thought. Separate. Separable.

Over the weeks that followed, he continued his course of lectures on technique, sometimes demonstrating directly on my body a principle of composition or of colour theory, sometimes on the canvas. As he talked, I felt as though I had ascended out of my own flesh and could look at it objectively with him, dispassionately. I tried to reassure myself that there was a difference between observing dispassionately and unpassionately. I quickly found I was prepared to go to surprising lengths to keep his interest alive, to make him want to go on looking. I would guffaw at the demure poses he asked of me (poses I would have blushed to attempt only weeks before) and would suggest ever more adventuresome ones. Never pornographic, but bolder. If he suggested I sit turned three quarters away, I gave him crouched and three quarters on. When he asked for something reminiscent of Cranach, I gave him Ingres. I discovered that I loved being looked at.

In the bedroom, we continued to do things very much as we had that day that Suzanne had a cold. Frank saved his inventiveness for the studio. I came to be less afraid of losing him as a lover than of ceasing to be interesting to him as a model.

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