^{1. Practice really does make perfect—or at least better…and, ½, there’s a nuance in meaning between naked and nude? Hmm.}

^{One night, over a decade ago, a supercool, art-school-educated, newly-made friend of mine asks while we’re hanging out at her place: “Wanna come to a drawing class I’m hosting? A model’s posing for us…she won’t have any clothes on.”}

^{My innocent eyes widen.} 😳^{“You mean,” I gasp, “she’ll be….naked.”}

^{Supercool friend holds up a finger and wags it at me while exhaling a long stream of cigarette smoke. “Oh no, no, no. It’s not naked…It’s nude. It’s art.”}

^{It seemed a bit like the serpent and Eve exchange…I mean in hindsight…the second-guessing and all that…}

^{Me: Naked.}

^{Friend: No, nude.}

^{Serpent: “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”}

^{Eve: “…God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”}

^{Serpent: “You will not certainly die,”...“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”}

^{Okay, no, my friend isn’t a serpent, but she did help to open my eyes up in a new way…although, thankfully, nothing calamitous resulted from it. :)}

^{Every week, she’d hold a figure drawing class in an old warehouse divided up into artists’ studios. Her students (eventually, I’d become one of them) would pay about fifteen bucks for two to three hours of drawing exercises, light instruction, and obligatory fancy art people snacks—fruit, berries, nuts, cheese and crackers, and, of course, wine…lots of wine. How else were you going to shut off the anxious side of your brain or get over the fact that there was a naked—no, nude—person at the front of the classroom? Or maybe I’m only speaking for myself. :)}

^{Got over the initial shock and anxiety I did.}

^{In a few months, after consistent weekly practice, I went from basically drawing round, childish people blobs to more or less accurately capturing the poses and natural form of any model who posed for us. I finally saw that the form was not just the figure itself but was also found in the blank spaces around it, the space between a neck and shoulder, between arms held akimbo. Such was my friend’s teacherly delight that she featured one of my drawings on an online page advertising her classes. (Still patting myself on the back years later, tee-hee.)}

^{2. The human body is a godly work of art.}

^{Like many young women, I had a terrible love-hate relationship with my body (mostly hate).}

^{These are too big, this is too small…Goldilocks over here.}

^{Then, in my friend’s figure drawing class, with the diversity of male and female models posing for us, I grew to find so much beauty in every kind of body and to slowly accept my own. I saw beauty in the purposeful, intentional design of bone structure and sinews and flesh, in curves and lines and bulk.}

^{A masterpiece doesn’t come together like this by chance.}

^{3. Imperfect beauty tends to be the best kind (in my humble opinion).}

^{This is sort of an offshoot of #2.}

^{We’re forever being presented with images of ideal bodies, male and female alike. But isn’t it wonderful to be reminded that not even the ideals are the ideal?}

^{Going to a figure drawing class was a great opportunity to be shaken out of my airbrushed, Photoshopped trance. I’d seen too many images. Compared myself to too many magazine bodies.}

^{But I came to understand that no body is perfectly symmetrical or proportionate, and those imperfect traits are what make the body beautiful.}

^{Figure drawing also helped me open up to more unconventional sides of beauty in nature or in a piece of clothing or art or design that has rawness and something off about it. They aren’t the perfect pictures of balance and harmony that are often tied to traditional beauty.}

^{The first time my interest in what some might call weird or ugly art (AKA contemporary art, bahaha!) became quite evident to me was when I visited the Whitney Biennial exhibit in 2019 and came across Janiva Ellis’ Uh Oh, Look Who Got Wet.}

^{My first thought was, “What the heck am I even looking at?” My second thought was, “Oh, my God, I love it!!!”}

^{Still not exactly sure what’s going on...Guess I’ll leave the analyzing up to the art school kids.}

^{The point is, something about the offness of the painting, the lurid colors, nature in a feminine form, two figures crossing a river (the one being carried looking like a mangled Pluto by Walt Disney?…a messed up mother and child situation going on here? nature pointing them away from the danger of the approaching fire????? is that blood in the water and on the ground or a reflection of the chaos on the horizon? is this about war?!)—anyway, it’s the painting’s borderline grotesqueness and sense of tension that stopped me and compelled me to drink everything in.}

^{Fine works of art continue to enchant us with their classical, idealized representations of beauty}

^{but I think it’s usually the off stuff that exposes us to the many facets of beauty, the complex kind of beauty, the lurid, the strange, the surreal, the jolie-laide, the enigmatic and super ethereal...etcetera and etcetera and etcetera.....}

A Digital Gallery of Pieces I Own