Life Drawing, by Eileen Pollack

​Life Drawing
​
Until a few weeks ago, the last time I’d drawn or painted anything was seventh grade. We’d been tasked with inventing a gadget that would make our lives easier. For reasons I can’t explain, I’d come up with a telescoping rubber cylinder you could stick in an electric socket to give you a few extra inches to plug in your toaster. We were sketching diagrams of our new inventions. My classmate Danny peered over my shoulder and announced: “Hey, everyone! Eileen just invented an electric penis!”
 
After that, I never drew anything again. I would have told you I was unable to draw a stick figure of a cat. Worse, I wouldn’t try. I dated a dozen artists, each of whom attempted to persuade me to draw or paint. Come on, all you have to do is put your pencil to the pad and move it. You can draw a line, can’t you? But I sat frozen, refusing to demonstrate how inept I was, how lacking in imagination.
 
Not only had my confidence been crushed by Danny’s joke, but later that semester I attempted to paint a portrait of a wise old rabbi and ended up with something that resembled a pink balloon to which someone had glued a wispy white beard and a yarmulke. Even before my teacher, Mr. Parks, tried unsuccessfully to suppress his laugh, I decided I would never again so much as doodle.
 
My lack of talent made sense. I had grown up in a world where people could be only one thing. If you were born male, you couldn’t display a flicker of femininity; if you were born female, god forbid you hated to wear a dress. If you were smart, you couldn’t be sexy; if you were nerdy, you couldn’t be athletic. An athlete couldn’t be smart. As the class brain, I certainly couldn’t be artistic.
 
But in the 55 years that followed, I discovered I loved every form of art. I visited every museum I could afford to visit. I hung out with painters, printmakers, sculptors, ceramicists, and cartoonists. Even the earliest homo sapiens had managed to dab their stubby fingers in soot and create moving renditions of horses, lions, bison. Surely, if I signed up for a very basic introductory class, even I could be taught to produce a recognizable banana or bowl of grapes.
 
So I registered for what the catalogue described as an all-day “drawing bootcamp.” Beginning with rudimentary exercises of "seeing" and "recording," we would “move through carefully prescribed steps” to the point where we might produce “quality drawings” with our newly acquired skills.
 
I was particularly excited to be provided with a list of required supplies—sketchbooks, graphite sticks, an ebony pencil, and the delicious-sounding “box of soft vine charcoal.” Who wouldn’t relish an excuse to wander the aisles of a giant store filled with coloured papers, paints, inks, canvases, brushes, and metal and wooden tools whose use barely could be imagined? As a writer, I love my MacBook Air. I enjoy buying a new Moleskine notebook or fine-tipped gel pen. But the instruments I use to write rarely influence the quality of whatever story I might produce. An artist who steps into a store like Blick’s must experience the surge of creativity that jolts a chef who traverses the aisles of a gourmet market or a contestant on Project Runway who has been granted an unlimited budget at Mood.
 
Usually, whatever activity I pursue, I try to pretend I’m not an amateur. At Blick’s, I happily surrendered to the heavily pierced and tattooed salesperson and begged for help in choosing the required items. Half an hour later, weighed down by the sort of large, flat, white plastic bag that announces I AM AN ARTIST, I made my way to my car, secretly afraid I had wasted fifty dollars on supplies I wasn’t talented enough to use, even with the most basic instruction. 
 
The morning of bootcamp, I lugged that same bag across Harvard Square to the Center for Adult Education, climbed the stairs, and took a few tentative steps into a brightly lit but appropriately grimy studio. Scattered around the room were easels and stools—far more intimidating than the tables and chairs I’d been envisioning, as if I would be returning to seventh grade to repeat Mr. Parks’s art class. The only occupants were a dumpy young guy in a grungy plaid shirt and a tall, sinewy, middle-aged man with long, thick, shiny black hair and a face so finely carved he appeared more a work of art than a mortal being. Neither man acknowledged my arrival; the taller of the two seemed particularly determined to remain aloof. No doubt they’d dismissed me as an elderly white woman who didn’t know one end of a paintbrush from another, which pretty much was what I was.
 
The other students filtered in, two of them older women like me, four much younger women, and one much younger man. The guy in the plaid shirt introduced himself as our instructor, let’s call him John, then startled me by introducing the taller man as our model. Our model? So that was why there was a stage at the front of the studio, backed by a mirrored wall. We would be learning to draw not an apple or a bunch of daisies but a naked human male!
 
As it turned out, this wasn’t a class for complete beginners but for artists who were novices at drawing nudes. Most of my classmates had been taking art classes since they were children. One earned her living as a graphic artist, though she did most of her drawing on a computer. Another lamented that they hadn’t taken any art classes since they were in college, which, judging by their appearance, couldn’t have been more than a few years earlier. 
 
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I must have misread the catalogue.” Queasy with shame, I saw myself grabbing my bag and swiftly exiting.
 
But the instructor urged me to stay. “You’ll do fine,” he assured me. “Just relax and have fun.”
 
Fun? Already I could visualize the grotesquely misshapen form I would be committing to one of the giant sheets of paper that still lay shrouded in my bag from Blick’s. That is, if I could bring myself to draw anything at all. Maybe, as my classmates sketched the entire nude man who would be standing on that stage before us, I could limit myself to drawing an arm or leg.
 
But I doubted I could accomplish even that. So what if I had wasted the $250 I’d squandered registering for the class and binging at Blick’s? After all, I’d spent my entire life avoiding any hobby, class, or sport I couldn’t excel in.
 
Then again, that meant I’d missed out on many of the pleasures my less egotistical peers had been enjoying. How could you know what you were good at unless you tried? Since childhood, I’d been told I sang so jarringly off-key I should do nothing but move my lips. Then, in my early sixties, I signed up for a class designed for people who’d been told they couldn’t sing, and by the end of the six-week term I was standing in front of the room, belting out a heartfelt, full-throated, and mostly on-key rendition of “Amazing Grace,” albeit with legs shaking so violently they almost buckled.
 
And so I stayed. I let the instructor show me how to set up my easel. Apparently, the list of supplies hadn’t been complete and I was missing essential implements, not least of which was an eraser. As a professor, I am used to being in command in any classroom; here, I felt grateful to the young woman to my right, who invited me to share the supplies she laid out on the table she’d set up between us. My heart fluttered not only with gratitude but the excitement I might have felt if one of the popular kids had deigned to sit next to me at lunch. How beautiful this woman was! She had the long, dark hair and enormous, soulful eyes of a Madonna. My students like to pretend a person’s appearance doesn’t matter. And yet, who doesn’t thrill to the proximity of someone they consider to be attractive, especially if that person is warm and kind?  
 
That’s when our model—I’ll call him Eduardo—took off his clothes. He was olive-skinned, long-limbed, with a close gray beard that drew attention to his exceptionally strong jaw. His chest and legs were lightly haired. He sported a nipple ring. I thought I would have no trouble remaining nonchalant. After all, I’d seen more than my share of naked men. But I’d recently been broken up with, and most of the men who wanted to date me were in their seventies. I often felt nauseatingly lonely and longed to be touched and held. Eduardo was young enough to be a turn-on, yet old enough that I didn’t feel pedophilic. The instructor lectured us on the etiquette of preserving our model’s dignity. But I wondered if that entailed stifling my attraction. Was I supposed to pretend I didn’t find Eduardo wildly sexy?  I was afraid I might insult his beauty by rendering him a cartoonish version of a man. How would I even start? With his head? His feet? Certainly not with his penis. 
 
Then I remembered what an artist friend once told me. You don’t just paint a horse or a tree. You paint light and dark. You paint colours. You paint lines and shapes and patterns. The instructor didn’t set us loose and ask us to draw Eduardo. First, he demonstrated how to hold a graphite pencil, which wasn’t how you would hold that same pencil to write a letter. He handed us each a dowel and showed us how to extend it at arm’s length and measure the proportions of Eduardo’s torso. Swiftly, he sketched the longest lines. Then he began to fill in the smaller, more detailed structures.                
 
I still felt apprehensive. But I’ve always been good at following instructions. I grabbed the graphite pencil the way the instructor showed us. I laid it to the giant pad of newsprint and instead of listening to the voice in my head that told me I didn’t know how to draw, I simply sketched what I saw  … not a naked man standing with his arms across his sternum, but this line, then that curve, then another line. I extended the dowel and measured the proportions of Eduardo’s shoulders to his hips, and then from hips to ankles. The pose lasted only twenty minutes, so I didn’t have time to add many details, but I was startled to find that I had drawn a recognizable—if headless—human form in vaguely the same pose as the model on the stage. 
 
Then Eduardo dropped his arms, widened his stance, thrust out his belly and hips, and turned a quarter to his right. I laid my pencil to my pad and drew. This time, I even blocked in Eduardo’s head, his pectoral muscles, his ribs, his navel. The legs came out too short and stodgy. The feet looked more like fins. I wasn’t a budding Michelangelo. And yet, if I had seen this image on anyone else’s easel, I would have said it gave off a certain defiant energy that Eduardo himself gave off, at least in the pose he’d chosen.
 
For his third pose, Eduardo took a pole and shifted it behind his neck, then lifted his arms and dangled his wrists on either side. His spine collapsed and he affected the dejected air of a laborer carrying two pails of water suspended from a yoke, or a criminal in the stocks, or Jesus crucified on his cross. I drew more quickly, so I had time to shade in the tendons in Eduardo’s neck, the curve of his ribs, his pelvis, the muscles in his thighs and calves, the dark, hairy patches beneath his arms. 
 
The instructor, meanwhile, had been circling quietly behind us, offering suggestions to the other students but not to me. I assumed my efforts were so appalling he didn’t know where to start, or he didn’t want to discourage a beginner’s wobbly first efforts.
 
“I can’t believe I’m doing this!” I gushed. “You don’t understand, I’ve never drawn anything at all before!” 
 
He nodded. “You’ve gotten the proportions just right,” he said.  
 
“Thanks,” I said, wishing he would join in my astonishment. But he was a young male artist who must have deemed it uncool to high-five an elderly female student. Or he was trying to move beyond praise and criticism, the way a psychologist once advised me to tell my toddler son not that I was proud of whatever he’d accomplished but that I hoped he was proud of himself and had enjoyed whatever activity he'd finally mastered.
 
By now, it was past noon and the instructor granted us a lunch break. Had two full hours really slipped by so quickly? As I left the studio, I tried not to compare my latest sketch to the sketches on the other easels. But I couldn’t help noticing that my version of Eduardo’s pose was no more or less accurate than any of the other students’.
 
After a quick slice of pizza, I wandered back to the studio. No one was there except Eduardo, who was relaxing on a stool with a tattered paisley shawl wrapped around his waist. I felt the ridiculous urge to praise his performance as our model, to tell him how beautiful he was, how interesting to draw. Pretending he wasn’t there felt as rude as having sex with a brand new partner, then rolling over and ignoring them. But of course I knew talking to Eduardo would be creepy and inappropriate, not only because we were supposed to respect our model’s privacy, but also because I would be forcing him to make conversation when all he wanted was to enjoy his lunch.
 
Then the afternoon session started, and the instructor tutored us in how to use the charcoal sticks and slabs, whose rich, dark, oily strokes seemed so sensual I wanted to spend the rest of my life swooshing them against the newsprint. John showed us how to use the charcoal to hatch every shade from the lightest gray to the most velvety black, how to squint and interpret the shadows and reflections that patterned Eduardo’s skin as shapes we could replicate on the page.
 
Eduardo spent most of the afternoon sitting on a box, facing this way, then that, both fists on his knee, twisting to the right, then leaning back. I drew the longest lines first, nearly whooping with joy as a shoulder materialized. I squinted and then shaded in a weird parallelogram of shadow at the figure’s throat, a faint grayish amoeba beneath his thigh, allowing the white to show through so it frosted Eduardo’s shin. As the image took shape, I experienced the same magician’s voila as when I bring a character alive using nothing but markings on a computer screen. 
 
This time, when the instructor complimented what I was drawing, I didn’t get the impression he was trying to boost my ego. In fact, he paid me the even greater compliment of providing hints as to how I might improve my sketch. What I especially appreciated was how specific his suggestions were, how nonjudgmental. “You might shorten that arm a bit,” he advised. “That knee might be just a little higher.” Miraculously, any change I wanted to make easily could be effected with the squishy eraser the young woman to my right allowed me to borrow.
 
Then Eduardo assumed his final pose. Seated, arms cradled across his knees, he bent so far forward that all I could see was the top of his head, with the thatch of raven-black hair hanging down in the front like wings. The pose reminded me of an early drawing by Vincent van Gogh, though van Gogh had drawn his model from the side rather than facing front. I vaguely remembered from an art history class I’d taken half a century earlier that the woman in Sorrow was a young prostitute van Gogh had found wandering the streets of the Hague, starving, pregnant, with her young daughter in tow. Whether from pity or love, the artist had taken the woman into his home, supported her and her child, used her as his muse, even offered to marry her.
 
I found myself wondering who Eduardo was and what he did when he wasn’t modeling. Did he have a girlfriend? A wife? A child? Was he modeling out of poverty, or was he an artist and this was his way of earning a few extra bucks? Was he vain of his looks? Was he feigning grief, or was he using this final pose to express the despair he’d finally allowed to overcome him? 
 
I laid one of the charcoal vines to the paper and started drawing. I can’t explain what overcame me, except that Eduardo’s slumped shoulders appeared on the pad before me. His arms. His knees. The great mass of black hair projecting forward, blocking most of his chest. His penis, long and thick, in what seemed to be a matching state of supplication. The dark cave of pubic hair from which that penis hung. I squinted and began smudging in the shadows, V’ing in the folds, the ridges, the dents. Lightening a knee, darkening a forearm and bicep. Whenever I judged I had gotten a shadow or curve just right, I felt a rush of satisfaction, as if a rubber bulb had inflated my lungs and given my heart an extra woosh as its pumped my blood. When I finished, I couldn’t believe what I’d created: 

Life Drawing, by Eileen Pollack, the author.

​If you had told me at the start of the day that I could have drawn this portrait, I would have scoffed. Right, and I can do a quadruple backflip like Simone Biles. What had changed in the 55 years since seventh grade? At 13, I’d had no idea what art was, why anyone would want to draw or paint or sculpt. No one had thought to tell me that art was meant to express the artist’s emotions or attract a viewer’s attention to some aspect of the physical world they otherwise might never really see. I wasn’t conscious of my own sadness, loneliness, anger, joy, or grief, and certainly not anyone else’s. I suppose I was vaguely aware that a flower, a tree, or a human being might be beautiful, but I hadn’t yet realized how valuable and rare beauty is, or how something that might seem ugly to other people might be exquisitely moving to me. At 13, I had no sense of the miracle, the fragility, of human life. And even though I was besieged by sexual and romantic longing (maybe Danny was right that my telescoping rubber plug was phallic), I would never have dreamed of expressing that longing in what I drew.
 
Sadly, that’s the way most subjects are taught. A child is expected to jump right in drawing, playing the piano, or solving quadratic equations without anyone attempting to convey the essence of that endeavor—its purpose, its beauty, why anyone would want to draw or play the piano or solve an equation in the first place. Rarely does the instructor spend time revealing the basic principles that will help the student get a feel for the task they are trying to accomplish. 
 
Before I became a writer, I was a physicist. It took me years before I realized I couldn’t solve a problem by merely thinking; I needed to use my imagination to get a feel for how everything in that physical system fit together. Even in physics, my emotional reaction to the problem mattered. In a similar way, my curiosity about Eduardo, my emotions toward him as a strikingly handsome man, turned out not to be irrelevant. Yes, his physical form was composed of straight lines and curves, patches of light and shadow. But he was also a human being toward whom I felt a particular connection, even if that connection originated in my imagination.
 
Of course it wouldn’t have been appropriate to pry into his private life, let alone attempt to seduce him, as so many male artists have attempted to seduce their models. Surely, most of the straight male artists who’ve painted nude women through the ages were taken with how beautiful those women were. Maybe they pitied or loved them, as van Gogh pitied or loved Clasina Maria Hoornik, the pregnant woman he used as his model for drawing Sorrow. The point is: their emotions came through in their drawings, their paintings, their sculptures.
 
The timer sounded. Eduardo stood and stretched and put on his street clothes. The young woman to my right glanced at my drawing, then turned back and studied it for another minute. “That’s wonderful,” she said, and I flushed with praise. Was I a 67-year-old prodigy? Hardly. But artistic talent, like most aspects of human behavior, doesn’t abide by an all-or-nothing binary. The ability to express oneself as an artist isn’t meted out in black and white but rather in every colour and shade between.

​Eileen Pollack

Eileen Pollack was one of the first two women to graduate from Yale University with a BS in physics; she later earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of the novels The Professor of Immortality, The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, and Breaking and Entering, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice selection, as well as two collections of short fiction, The Rabbi in the Attic and In the Mouth, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. Eileen’s work of creative nonfiction Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull was made into a movie starring Jessica Chastain. Her investigative memoir The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club was published by Beacon Press in 2015; a long excerpt appeared in the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went viral, after which she spent five years touring the United States, working to advance the opportunities for women and people of color in STEM fields. Her work has been selected for Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best American Travel Writing. Her most recent book is an essay collection entitled Maybe It's Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman, which received starred reviews in Kirkus and PW. A former director of the MFA Program at the University of Michigan, she is now a professor emerita and lives and writes in Boston, where she is the writer in residence at U Mass—Boston.