Right at home

One of the gifts of The Yellow House (where, surprisingly, I've lived for five years now) are these magnificent multi-coloured parrot tulips -- I call them my "Harlequins." Our first spring here, two of them improbably poked up through the dense growth of the front yard hellebores, and it was love at first sight.

Last fall, I found similar bulbs on sale, swooped them up, and gave them more room to thrive this year. Working on my knees in the garden, savouring what's in bloom and dreaming of what some day might follow, is one of those things that makes me feel perfectly at home -- right here, in my own skin; in the zone; where I'm meant to be.

I had the same quiet thrill when I at last checked out Basic Inquiry Studio, a Vancouver non-profit drawing group that offers many different types of drawing sessions with live models. You can check out Basic Inquiry here  and watch a brief video describing what life drawing is like from the model's point of view.

For my trial run, I chose the session with the typical art school routine, warming up with one- and two-minute poses, then progressing to five-minute, 15-minute and half-hour poses. As the 3-hour session unfolded, I was metaphorically walking on air. Here's a sampler (you can view the whole batch in sequence here) with a one-minute pose first:--

Now five minutes each:--

Fifteen minutes each:--

By the way, the point of all this is not necessarily to have something to show for it -- it's the ongoing practice just like a musician's doing scales, or "laying track" as Julia Cameron of "The Artist's Way" would call it. I had just been explaining this to a friend when I came across this link referencing my revered virtual teacher Kimon Nicolaides (1891-1938; yup, from before I was born) with a similar idea.

Here's the first half-hour pose:--

Second half-hour pose:--

And with some time to spare on that one, I did a quick Matissean wrap-up:--

And here's the final half-hour pose. There should be a thought-bubble above her head that says, "Yup. REALLY like doing this. I'll be back."