[Links] True Blog Stories

[soulac]

Thanks so much for the Alaska article. I have been looking for it and couldn't find it anymore. It must be at least 15 years old. As you said, it's not available.

You wouldn't happen to have the pics that go with the article would you? The one of Kenyon is really cute.

Thanks again!

[aktdrawing]

Originally Posted by soulac

Thanks so much for the Alaska article. I have been looking for it and couldn't find it anymore. It must be at least 15 years old. As you said, it's not available.

You wouldn't happen to have the pics that go with the article would you? The one of Kenyon is really cute.

Thanks again!

The article was from 2016, so I'm surprised it's no longer available. The pic I remember, but don't have it unfortunately.

Glad you enjoyed. And I still have loads of texts to post!

[aktdrawing]

Who likes asian?

This is an article about an Asian-American model. It even features some pics. Not too revealing, as usual in such articles, but still nice to see them



When Guillermo Tapia invited me to participate in a nude drawing session, I envisioned a French parlor room setting where steely-eyed, mustachioed artists slaved away over large sheets of paper. The actual class couldn’t have been more different.

Five artists and I recently gathered in a cozy artspace just north of Race Street in the Riverside area. The night’s model was in high spirits. Grace Pham, wearing an oversized rain jacket to cover her nude body, told me the drawing sessions are a great way to meet other local artists.

“Were you nervous the first time you did this?” I asked.

“No,” she replied without hesitating. “I’ve always been pretty outgoing.”

Tapia soon got down to business.

“Tonight, we’re doing five one-minute sessions, three five-minute sessions, and one 30-minute session,” he said. “You guys ready? Start.”

Pham casually disrobed and assumed a seated position with her left hand resting on her elevated left knee.

I’ll admit, I was a little skittish about what to expect. And it took me a few minutes to feel comfortable resting my eyes on Pham without feeling like I was gawking. Once I got over that barrier, though, there were many more challenges to come.

Digital artist Alan Linnstaedt, presumably sensing my befuddlement, offered some advice.

“I wouldn’t get into super-fine details,” he said to me as I fumbled my way through the first couple of drawings.

With my weapon of choice, a stick of charcoal, I barely outlined one side of Pham’s body before Tapia called time. The opening exercises, I later found, were warm-ups, intended to prepare the hands and mind for the longer stretches to come. Pham proved an adept model that evening. Each pose — whether with her arms outstretched, with her fist pensively supporting her chin, or while dreamily lying on her side — was held patiently. Over the next hour, I learned how hard drawing from a model can be. My attempts were more human-ish looking than human.

As the drawing session ended, the young artists thanked Tapia for hosting the event. Many commented on how difficult it is to find local, affordable events like the one they just attended. The participants donated what money they could to cover the cost of the model.

The figurative sketching classes are barely one year old. Last summer, Tapia employed the concept to attract locals to a different Race Street studio, one in need of tenants. The sessions proved so popular that Tapia began hosting them regularly, along with fee-based classes led by local artist Alexa Alarcon and others. Tapia branded his concept Artluck. More established artists like Jeremy Joel, Brandon Pederson, and Jay Wilkinson had opened a group studio nearby dubbed Bobby on Drums just months earlier. The timing was auspicious. Tapia began hosting figurative drawing sessions at Bobby on Drums, and young painters flocked to see the popular artists’ workspace.

That summer, Noel Viramontes, founder of the artspace/venue FWBLACKHOUSE (pronounced “Fort Worth Black House”), connected with Tapia via Instagram. The two shared an online interest in the Riverside area, and the friendship soon led to artistic collaborations.

“We like to bring the arts into locations that don’t have it yet,” Viramontes said, adding that he and Tapia “both saw potential in neighborhoods” along Race Street.

By the River Art Fest, held off Race Street last June, featured 11 artists, including Tapia, Wilkinson, Atticus Broadbent, and Julian Gonzales.

“FWBLACKHOUSE really helped us out” with that show, Guillermo said, adding that Artluck is “about collaborations.”

Over the following year, Artluck’s programs expanded to include pop-up shows, lectures, mixers, and other artist-related events. Last March, Artluck presented the pop-up Good Bones at the nearby venue The Post. The open-air event space on Race Street drew several dozen fans to see paintings and photographs by Tapia, Laura Bacigalupo, John Fernandez, and several other artists.

Tapia credits businesses like Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer and The Collective Brewing Project for donating product, providing spaces for his shows, and boosting the resources available to Artluck.

Dee Lara, a friend of Tapia’s and founder of the hybrid art gallery Art Tooth, said Artluck “taps into Fort Worth’s rich tradition in drawing and painting and expands it by establishing a community space for access to educational art without the typical barriers for entry.”

Lara and many of the artists who attended the recent drawing session noted that those opportunities are largely limited to academic settings.

“We’re still figuring out the best use of our time,” Tapia said, referring to the balancing act of organizing shows and providing figurative drawing sessions. “We’d like to reach outside of the Riverside area and see where that takes us. We’re expanding the arts scene in Fort Worth, and the best way to go about it is through collaborations. We hope to expand into the city and beyond.”


hxxps://www.fwweekly.com/2017/05/10/welcome-artluck/

[aktdrawing]

This time, a bit shorter text from Canada. There are two pics (sadly, not showing any highlights, as usual) but I couldn't add them here for some reason.


hxxps://www.guelphmercury.com/life/fine-art-models-dispel-myths-about-posing-nude/article_1ef8d01b-678e-563e-b8ef-4443ee668a17.html


WINNIPEG — Since taking her first uncertain steps into a University of Manitoba sketch class eight years ago, Marley Rae McDuff has been inviting people to look.

Now, the fine art model wants them to listen.

“I want people to have a better understanding about what it is that a fine art model does,” said McDuff, 40. “It’s serious. It’s work. It’s hard work for many people. And it’s not something to be ashamed of.”

Because sometimes shame is pushed on fine art models, McDuff said. Shame, and stigma: the guy who told her that what she was doing was immoral and “no better than pornography.” The friend who told her that it wasn’t “really work.”

Not so, say the 286 members of the reDEFINEartsconnective. It’s a group of fine art models aiming to fight stigma, strengthen the industry, and show the world how beautiful their work can be, even before it makes it to a gallery wall.

McDuff founded the group in 2008. At first, it was slow to grow. “It was more like me by myself,” she says with a laugh. “Some big collective.”

Now, the models are uniting behind the cause: in the last year, reDEFINE’s membership has exploded.

Shortly after Muriel Torchia stumbled on the reDEFINEartsconnective’s Facebook page of job opportunities two years ago, she found herself standing nude before members of the Winnipeg Sketch Club.

Now, she’s hooked. “I didn’t expect I’d be doing it for this long,” said Torchia, 27. “It’s been really rewarding. It’s made me a lot more confident.”

But Torchia, who models for the Winnipeg Art Gallery, has also seen the stereotypes. One would-be photographer asked if she did anything “extra, off-camera.” Others assume her relationship with her fiancé must be on the rocks.

“Artistic modelling is not sexual in nature,” she said. “There is a difference between nudity and sexuality. If this was Europe, or South America, I don’t think there’d be the same derogatory idea that comes with it. Here, people are like ‘Oh my goodness, you pose nude? What do people think of this?’ ”

Torchia, McDuff and other members of the collective are ready to show Winnipeg just what the art modelling world is made of. They’re working on a breast cancer benefit show; they hold safety seminars; they advocate for healthy wages and increased awareness of the challenges of posing for an artist’s pen.

“It’s essential,” said Winnipeg artist Robert Sim. “You need to be familiar with what a body looks like, how they move. You can work from photographs, but you’ll learn far less about the construction of the body. And then when it comes to constructing figures out of your imagination ... it will be exceedingly difficult.”

To help artists master that understanding, Torchia, McDuff and their peers will explode in goosebumps in an unheated studio, twist their bodies into striking poses, and hold still for hours.

They can make anywhere from $15 to $40 an hour.

“I would like to see someone else actively stand or lie in the same position for even 15 minutes without moving or appearing different.” Torchia laughs. “It’s not always an easy job to do.”

[soulac]

Originally Posted by aktdrawing

This time, a bit shorter text from Canada. There are two pics (sadly, not showing any highlights, as usual) but I couldn't add them here for some reason.



Shortly after Muriel Torchia stumbled on the reDEFINEartsconnective’s Facebook page of job opportunities two years ago, she found herself standing nude before members of the Winnipeg Sketch Club.

Now, she’s hooked. “I didn’t expect I’d be doing it for this long,” said Torchia, 27. “It’s been really rewarding. It’s made me a lot more confident.””

Here are the pics from this article. Interestingly, the captions in the article say that the artist shown is actually another model.

[aktdrawing]

Here's the next story, from New Zealand!

From a nervous first-timer to relaxed model (and a nice MILF if you're interested in such stuff :P). The photo shows her with a drawing from when she posed pregnant.

hxxps://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/summer-times/completely-composed-life-model-confides

Life drawing model Rhia Robb went from being a bundle of nerves as a first-timer to a regular who has become so relaxed she has gone to sleep while posing.
Miss Robb, who has three children and is a master's student studying social policy, has been a regular life drawing model for the past couple of years, modelling while pregnant and breastfeeding.

"After my pregnancy with my second child I thought, `My body's amazing, I can run, I can have babies, I can do these things'."

She also recognised she was getting closer to 40 (she is 37), and wanted "a story when I'm older".

Following naked fear, elation
Life drawing fundamental skill for artists to attain
Of her first time as a model, Miss Robb said she was extremely nervous.

"I knew it was one of those things; I just had to drop my robe and do it.

"I was in the middle of the room, there were about 20 people.

"It was just like `drop your robe', and I did, and I was naked in front of 20 people."

She said during her first stint she perspired a lot, was "quite uptight" and strongly aware of her feelings of modesty in front of younger and older people, and men.

Now, however, it was just a job

"It doesn't bother me any more.

"I feel capable, confident, they're not there to critique me; more than anything they're concerned about their line or their drawing, they're not there to judge me."

She had modelled right through her youngest son's pregnancy, and taken him to life drawing sessions, allowing the art students to draw while she breastfed.

"It's a good little job.

"I like it; it makes me think about my body in different ways.

"I'm not really concerned at this point in my life about wrinkles or cellulite or things like that, and it's quite nice to just see beauty in the shape and the change."

[aktdrawing]

This time, a teenage model for change (19)! Enjoy


hxxps://www.denverpost.com/2013/04/26/nude-models-are-crucial-figures-in-csu-art-class/

FORT COLLINS, Colo.—Makenna Caballer wakes up, puts on makeup, chooses an outfit and makes her way to the Visual Arts Building on Colorado State University’s campus.

Then she undresses—all eyes turn to her figure made warm by overhead lights as the work day begins.

The 19-year-old is one among a handful of students working as models in the university’s art department. Their bodies—some lean, others muscular and curvy—are analyzed, measured and assessed by artists who take the image of a living, breathing person and splash it upon the blank canvases before them.

These people are muses, subjects of intense scrutiny by budding art students learning the idiosyncrasies of the human form.



REKLAMA

“I don’t see them as a nude person,” said Gracie Stamps, a 20-year-old sophomore studying art and journalism at CSU. “I just see them as a problem you have to solve. Taking them from real life to paper.”

“It’s a different way of drawing than using a picture,” she said, explaining the challenge of visualizing a person’s mathematically complex proportions or using reality to break preconceived notions of what a head or arm really looks like. There’s something intricate, different about taking a model from the third- to second-dimension.

A tan blanket wrapped around her petite but “curvy” frame like a bathroom towel, Caballer waited for the Introduction to Figure Drawing course to begin on a recent Thursday morning. When seven students were seated and waiting upon wooden benches, Caballer’s bare feet carried her across the cool, paint-speckled concrete to a short stage splashed with light.

For the next 20 minutes or so, she’d bend at the waist or raise a graceful arm above her head in a series of faster-paced gestures. Onlooking students made quick to capture her changing curves and motion in the reds and browns of conte crayon—a claylike medium.

Caballer’s face stayed calm, focused. If she minded fellow students looking on upon the Mickey and Minnie head tattoos near her collarbones—or anything else, for that matter—an observer couldn’t tell.



“It just kind of came naturally,” Caballer said of modeling nude for a class for the first time last semester. After taking the job her roommate and friend, Shelby Thomas, saw advertised online, the undeclared major was “honestly mostly nervous about the modeling and gesture aspect, than my body.”
While there was a time not that long ago when Caballer’s confidence dipped low, that time is no longer. “I’m pretty confident about my body,” she said, adding that modeling has helped grow appreciation of herself.


Eyebrows raise and voice pitches creep up a decibel occasionally when the models tell people what they do.



Associate professor Gary Keimig knows times are changing.

For one, there’s no more talk of controversy that once had people objecting to enrolling in classes that used nude models. The last of such talk ended roughly 15 years ago, he said.

More recent, however, is the shift to a quicker-paced artistic world that’s seen its fair share of digital integration. At some institutes, students work solely from printed images and digital projections.

“It would be a completely different experience,” Keimig said of a figure-drawing class absent a living model and the opportunity to see, up close, the anatomy of a human being.

“It’s the difference between something that’s real and something that’s virtual,” said Keimig, who believes our culture, in some ways, blurs the two.

But that isn’t the case at CSU, where the three models interviewed by the Coloradoan agreed something would be lost from art education should digital images replace them.

“It’s a rare treat,” Hasler said of students’ opportunity to draw with a sense of urgency that comes from having a model set before them.

“Students quickly move beyond this naked person” to recognizing their bodies as art, she said during a class break.

“You really look at a person in a different way.”