It’s taken lots of practice and I must admit, I have had my pitfalls. In second year university I took several fine arts courses, one of which was oil painting. We spent the majority of the year painting still life (posed displays of junk- mostly flowers) and once we perfected our brush skills, we moved on to nudes. Nudes every day. We duplicated master-nudes, painted details (small snapshots) of nudes and even had live models come in for days and days to be painted in the buff. Our final project was a large painting of our own subject matter (with the instruction that it must be a nude). Most people chose to paint themselves as a nude (from a photograph that I hope was destroyed after the project). Other people hired models and used rented studio time to complete their paintings. I decided to be original and do something no one else had done. I asked Stuart to let me paint him naked.
(On a side note- if you have ever painted anyone naked, you understand what I mean when I say that nudity becomes meaningless after 3 hours of staring at butts and boobs. People become a sum of parts and you won’t remember why you were giggling at the beginning of class.)
He agreed to be my model and so I set him up in my dorm room. For five days (in 3 hour increments) he reclined in the same position (with some urging and repositioning) on my tiny little dorm room bed.
It was during this critique that I realized why people don’t paint in their dorm rooms and use the studio instead. My painting had appeared perfectly proportioned mid-process. ‘Surely this was the greatest thing I have ever created’, I thought. Now that I could step back and take a look at it, I recoiled in horror. The perspective was COMPLETELY OFF. I hadn’t had enough space in my closet-of-a-room to step back and check my proportions and perspective. The painting appeared to recede away from the canvas, with Stuarts body far in the background and the point of focus (and the object closest to the viewer) being *gasp* his JUNK!
Though I have kept much of my art that I created during University, I decidedly threw that painting into the fire during a particularly cold May 24 camping weekend (we were in need of firewood). It popped and sizzled and was consumed by flames torturously slow. By morning, only a single piece of canvas remained in the ashes, perfectly preserved. I don't need to tell you what image remained, except that I felt cursed by the nude-painting-fairy and as a result I was the butt of all jokes for the rest of the weekend.
