Like the stately swan we glide gracefully onwards with barely a ripple on the untroubled waters and yet beneath the surface our big fat feet are pedalling like the clappers. You may think our weekly life drawing sessions have come to resemble the swan, and yet each week the well oiled routine swings into action but for that to happen urgent phone calls need to be made, frantic exchanges of emails, biscuits need to be carefully selected and bought, cups washed, sugar bowls filled, tables wiped and teabags lined up like little plump soldiers. All this loose talk of clothed models and short poses has not gone unheeded, beneath the surface, high level negotiations have been taking place and prior to the press conference I am able to leak that on Thursday 31st May we will unveil our first clothed model. The session will have a surprising model in the form of comedian Martin Mor. I kid you not, Martin will pose for us as part of a project he's undertaking to assemble as many portraits of himself as he can, these portraits will then form a crucial part of his forthcoming tour. I will let him explain the rest, I daresay you will have plenty of questions and Martin will be ready to answer them.
Roger our ever loyal and inspiring model will be our first short pose candidate on the evening of Thursday 19th July, another date for your diary. This will make for an interesting evening as old buffers like myself will be confronted with a whole set of new challenges, in a strange way I'm very much looking forward to it.
Last night we played hosts to a rare visitor, Julie from Nottingham and Mike. I like Julie's hair, her short bob frames her head perfectly. Somewhere at the back of my mind I had the image of Maurice Lambert's beautiful portrait bust of Edith Sitwell where the hair almost coddles the face. Also Julie rather miraculously managed to keep a gentle beatific smile throughout her ordeal, the mark of a true professional where the smile doesn't fade into a grimace. Although I (as usual *yawn), focused on the head, others went for the not altogether easy pose. Cathy with a fine marker pen, undaunted confronted her large sheet of white paper and like Stanley Spencer she started at the top and just worked her way down. It's an odd way of drawing like a distracted doodle gone ballistic and yet it works most of the time and even when it doesn't she just draws a little addition to be added later. The last time I saw someone draw like this was when I watched an archaeologist record a burial site, the pen objectively tracing each stone and twig meticulously without an ounce of emotion or apprehension. I wonder if under that warm exterior Cathy has a heart of ice, the gimlet eyes and trained fingers of the professional assassin somehow betrayed in each drawing, I think she's a sleeper and I'm going to watch her very carefully from now on.
Haydn did a sterling job on the head but struggled with the subtlety of the pose. Ivan went into wide angle mode with some interesting distortions from his seated viewpoint. I really like the way at times Ivan's work flirts with caricature without committing whole hearted-ly to it. His line is sensitive and thoughtful in a way we don't often see these days, with the cornucopia of materials available to us it takes the ascetic rigour of a monk to restrict themselves week after week to pencil, eraser and white paper. Steven is also monkish-ly inclined but he's sneaked a plum bob into his devotions to ensure accuracy and a touch of flagellation in those quiet moments. I like the way almost imperceptibly Steven's drawings are getting looser, the occasional scribble, stray lines meander now in a way the austere Steven of yore would not have sanctioned. I think the drawings are lovely, I defy anyone to say otherwise but now a little something else is sneaking in, a willingness to follow and not always lead and that surely is a mark of growing confidence. And the notorious plum bob served him well as Steven captured the subtle thrust and weight distribution of the pose beautifully. Russell was another one who got it right, look at the work as a thumbnail before clicking on it and note how well that elbow juts forward. In the bigger image it's not so obvious as the marks and forms separate but the thumbnail creates the illusion of a view looking at the work across a room. Which brings me neatly to an opportunity to do just that at the North Yorkshire Open Studios where Russell and Bren will be showing their work. I urge you all to pack a picnic and have a day out visiting the studios of our talented friends, I promise you won't regret it!
I would write more (I can almost hear the sigh of relief) but I have high blood pressure and a pounding headache at the moment, the doctor has advised me to rest and avoid stress so I'm going to do just that and lie down with a good thriller featuring a spy called Katia, codename Cathy. Thank you all once again for coming along and joining Tony and I in having fun and making art in the company of a fine model, we couldn't do it without you.
Paintings and drawings by Cathy, Hadyn, Ivan, Mike, Neil, Peter, Roger H, Roger S, Russell, Sandra, Steven, Sue, Tom and Tony.

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