Katherine Parkinson’s character Mary sits for her portrait in Lights Up: Sitting on BBC4 this evening. Writing the play and acting the single character who appears – we never glimpse the artist – she’s caught the awkwardness of most life class poses in the photograph in this week’s Radio Times.
After six or seven years I gave up on the weekly life class at Wakefield College because, looking back on my drawings, I preferred some of the early ones to my later efforts. The five-minute poses that the tutor used to start off the class livened things up a bit but for a pose that the model had to hold for an hour the possibilities were somewhat limited.
These days I prefer draw people on location, preferably while I’m sitting outside a coffee shop, which could be a possibility starting next week.