THE ARTIST

Today I’m glad I stored my trusty laptop in the trunk of the Rio. I wasn’t sure I wanted to write today, but my reading, only a few more pages of Vidal’s The GOLDEN AGE to go, wasn’t keeping me concentrated. Too much post nasal drip clogged my throat and my eyes felt sandy, scratchy. But writing called to me so out to the cold trunk to get my Mactop and, so, to writing.

I’ve taken a few classes in drawing in my life, at the senior center and at Spokane Art School. I haven’t started a drawing in well over a year, but every once in awhile, something will catch my eye, like yesterday at Hammer’s coffee shop in downtown Spokane, and I’ll imagine starting a project.

I was eyeing two, chubby (not fat) young women at the coffee counter over the top edge of Vidal’s book when a vision came to me with my lightly stirred libido providing the impetuous. These young women were chubby in a Rubenesque, delightful sort of way. They were there for some time after buying their lattes, sitting at a table chatting as women do, friendly with one another and smiling. One, more than once, glanced toward my ancient visage. Did I remind her of a doting grandfather? Was she so nearsighted she couldn’t tell how old I was?

Though heavy, they still had small waistlines but larger than life breasts. Their flesh was firm and smooth rather than droopy and creased like mine. Their faces were pretty and one had short black hair while the other’s locks were sandy, medium long and curly.

Suddenly, in my vision, they were naked, on their knees and left hands, facing one another with the right hand in a clawed position. They were as two cats hissing at one another, playfully I imagined, two bosom buddies in imaginary cat fight. I realized I would take snapshots of the two posed that way and work from photos. With tripod, I saw myself beginning toward the rear of one the young ladies, a bit to the side though so that the face of the other would be in the picture and working in a half circle to the rear of that other face.

My imagining stirred me up quite a bit. I could see the beginning photo of the series of shots quite clearly. The round buttocks of the one woman with the round cherubic face of the other to the left of those globes of delight. I felt a delightful, friendly humor in the whole thing, the three of us enjoying our project in the intimacy of my imaginary studio.

I have had the experience of sketching a nude while taking a drawing course. My feeling was erotic as I contemplated my subject but not lustful. She was not a beautiful young woman at all, but an older, fleshy, mottled woman of considerable experience in France. The feeling I had was love, respect and awe for her. Drawing my nude, I felt intimately connected to her, as if we were two alone, sharing an experience, even though in the presence of other art students. It was now the same with these two young women—erotic, stimulating with intimations of intercourse unfulfilled.

I repeatedly imagined approaching them to ask them to be a part of my project and reviewed the project in my mind several times, wandering if I took up drawing in a serious way, would I really be able to ask strangers to pose for me?

Then, suddenly, my two posers were facing away from each other, sitting back on their heels with hands on knees and faces jauntily turned up, nose proud of their youthful nudity. They were bookends with a large book squeezed between their fulsome buttocks. What would the book be? The first book I saw would be proportionately large to match the size of its bookends.

Then, suddenly, my imagination quickened, and the book became a small, real size book squashed between huge real life buttocks. The slender volume was almost lost in the flesh. Very funny indeed! At first, it was only a nameless book, confronting the realities of flesh, then a book about sex, then a book about men which these proud women to the core of their bottomly life disdained. The book grew large and shrank again as I looked for interesting images.

Now my women faced each other again in their original pose and between them stood a very skinny woman, an anorexic dying woman with hand on hip. Now my posers weren’t so disdainful. They wanted to be slender like this self-destructive woman. Then the object between my fleshy women became the headless, skinny mannequin which I’d seen that morning while passing through Nordstrom’s. Everything and nothing to be read into that headless part!

Next my two fleshy, nude women became four women, and the object they surrounded became a 70 to 80 year old woman, knowledgeable and aloof in her nude droopiness and lined, dry skin, as if she had a secret these younger women could only guess at, then a coy, middle-aged religious woman protecting her crotch appeared to me. Soon I imagined a whole series of these drawings or paintings in which different objects or persons were surrounded by my youthful, nude, heavy women by twos and fours.

Each imagined image drew from me a different reaction, but mostly it was a lighthearted series, poking fun at so many of our cultural pretensions and hidden reactions to what confronts the women among us. Then the two women left the coffee shop and I returned to Vidal’s homosexual rapier, none the worse for wear, having mounted my imagination and given it a good gallop over fertile fields.
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“The important thing in acting is to be able to laugh and cry. If I have to cry, I think of my sex life. If I have to laugh, I think of my sex life.” —Glenda Jackson