At the art school I went to, life drawing as a process had virtually vanished at least partly due to the feminist discussions in the '80s which had argued that there was no way of studying the female form without objectifying it. Rather than confront this issue head-on, it seemed that my course had simply chosen to stop having life drawing. You could book a model if you wanted to, but it was only after a lot of questions you might find out that this service was available.

It seems absurd to me to stop drawing the female figure. To me interesting art is usually figurative, about people (I'm a bit of a traditionalist deep down!) -what is so wrong with drawing people? Also, again I'm being a traditionalist, but life drawing is really fucking hard, it's one of the hardest drawing exercises there

is. It's also a lot more stimulating than drawing still lifes. To get rid of it is to get kids through art school who can't draw, which sucks...

It helps modeling when you've been the artist previously. When you know that the main struggle is getting the right lines down on the paper, when that's the main thing going through people's minds. To me the way to combat the exploitation was to be both artist and model, artist and muse. At the same time in fact, when you look at my piece Tableaux Vivants (a performance piece where an artist is drawing me in real time through the piece. The audience is watching the drawing being made, the

relationship in real time between artist and model. And listening to them communicating). The more life drawing becomes some historical anachronism, the more it will become shrouded in cliches where both model and artist become something other than mere human beings. The reality is not usually so romantic. I would love to write more about it- I've just finished reading Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant where he talks about modeling. The fact that this profession attracts interesting, often eccentric people helps to romanticize it.

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