It was hard to think of it as anything other than a naked person just sitting in the middle of the room. Then again, it was also hard to see it as that without getting caught up in the twisting curves of her body. Not in a sexy way, even, though it would have been easy to be just a kid about it, to snicker and save jokes up for later. Elaine wished that she didn’t want to make jokes at all, but possibly the urge to giggle would go away. The woman hunched as she took her robe off, and her shoulders were still trying to curve around to cover her body even as she was sitting nude in the midst of a bunch of staring strangers. Elaine felt a stab of empathy for the woman, uncomfortable as she looked despite most people’s seeming indifference. Everybody else was just measuring limbs with charcoal held up before them, squinting and sweeping confident strokes across their paper. Elaine picked up her pencil and held it to the paper, waiting for some idea of what to do. She watched the light cling to the woman’s hip and thigh, studied the shadow reaching down her waist, looked for a long time at the flow of her neck into her shoulder and the jut of her collarbone.
Sarah kept her eyes on the guy by the corner. He was looking at her too, but he wasn’t looking at her face. She felt the blood coloring her cheeks and tried not to wince. So there was a good-looking man staring intently at her naked body. He wasn’t exactly smiling about it. It was a strange and singular experience to have her body be the subject of such an academic way of looking. People had looked at her body in a lot of different ways in her life, and when somebody that handsome looked at her naked it was either with something approaching indifference, or with lust. She’d never felt that detached kind of interest before, and she didn’t think she liked it. Still, it was intriguing. Their job was sort of to find something beautiful in her as she just sat there, more or less, wasn’t it? She didn’t know anything beautiful about her own body most of the time, except for the times when she fit perfectly with somebody else, or the odd moments when the shape of her own face and body in the mirror after a shower startled her like that of a beautiful stranger.
The model was pretty, in a bland kind of way. She was sort of skinny but with a charming swell of the hips and belly, and her face was okay. That wasn’t the point though. Trent was trying to figure out how to draw her, and he was sort of stuck. He had an outline on his paper, her vague shape sketched in, but he didn’t know what to do with it. Was he going to color big blocks of shadow and streaks of highlight in white, or was he going to shade exhaustively until you could almost feel the slopes and hollows in the deepening of black? Maybe he should crosshatch. Maybe it should be very stylized. This was always his problem. He could see her as a person, as a girl, and then she was not very interesting. Trent wasn’t great with people. He didn’t know how to talk to girls unless they talked first, because then he could tell if they wanted to sleep with him or not. Either way it was easy from there. This girl would probably sleep with him. That wasn’t the point. The point was that he was looking at the naked body of this woman in front of him, a stranger, and he couldn’t figure out how best to draw it. As a girl her face was dull and her body predictable, but as art she was altogether too fascinating. The bumps and crevices of her body wanted his pencil to trace them. He had to carve out the shadows and round out the light shining on skin. The problem was that there was too much beauty in one body to put on a piece of paper. His pencil was still and the paper was full of possibilities.
all the in between 