Nineteen seventy two, late October, my memory feels it was a Thursday, perhaps Friday, in the life studio with my easel, drawing board and sheaves of quality drawing paper, a selection of drawing pencils of various softnesses 2B 3B, and vision and a model and me and I just, for the life of me, find it impossible to get the sketch to say anything. Then she twists and turns just for me. “Oh! Oh, mummy! How I love that lonely bumble bee!” I thought. “Sometimes you just can’t think straight....”
The model was called, let me suggest, if my memory serves me well, Louisa, and she was neither fat nor wrinkled nor old or grey nor deformed or toothless nor senile in any way, which made her nakedness incredibly easy to look at, which made her nakedness incredibly difficult to draw. She was twenty five years old, perched on a high, paint splattered stool, her right elbow resting on a grubby plaster Doric style column, that I remember clearly, and she spoke in soft tones, when she asked for a break, a cup of tea, to change her pose, she spoke in a poetry of becoming coyness, of a past somewhat Syd Barrett, somewhat distant, somewhat disjointed, remembered from way, way back behind the remote gaze of her glazed brown eyes.
For us, seventeen year old arts students discovering Bowie and Reed, she was the earthly princess of experience, a little bit of experience we could touch vicariously....“The Blue Moth!”....and I was supposed to be worshiping her with my drawing instruments, but I was utterly unable to study her to draw. I was incapable of getting my head round the idea. “Hi there, little bee! Bee, promise to be beautiful forever, like The Pretty Girl here....”
The boys and girls had given up and retired to the bar and the beer and the table football to exercise their wrists. Me, I had five minutes before Louisa wrapped herself in a tatty oriental silk dressing gown and floated, no, better, flitted off into the real world playing the part of The Blue Moth....“Mummy! Mummy, she’s dancing for me, mummy! Look! See?”
“I want to see everything!” I exclaimed, and rather shocked myself with my vehemence. “I want to see everything but I can’t stand in enough different places at the same time! I need to see it all!” So, at that, Louisa opened her legs and I could truly see more than I had ever seen before. “No! No! Sorry, I didn’t mean that Louisa, really....” But she, being the princess she was, smiled regally and fluttered off into the mists of nostalgia only to be remembered with lost lust forty years later.
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