Life room life

When I started my Foundation teaching there were three life models, all on full-time contracts. Anne, Mavis and Rosie. They were a combined force to be reckoned with, led by Anne and ably support by Rosie who was chatty and charming and Mavis who was solid and more like someone’s mum.

Anne combined her job with overseeing life-mode provision for everywhere else in Leeds, so if you needed a model for a Swarthmore adult education class you simply asked Anne and one would appear, and if not Anne would be there instead. Anne seemed to do all sorts, if you had a party or opening she would be there washing glasses and cleaning up; she watered the plants and generally kept the life-room tidy. The models hung around the models’ room, (a tiny room between floors where the bridge between Vernon Street and Rossington Street is now), Anne smoking constantly and reading between sessions.

One of the fascinating things about Anne was that she would never take her glasses off. She wore those flyaway slightly 50s style glasses that turned up at the edges. Black framed and distinctive, they appeared in all the life drawings, no matter how much you might recommend to students that they didn’t need to draw them in, they did. The students were of course right. The glasses were integral to Anne’s personality and without them she would have lost her identity.

People would remark on her image when students went for interviews. After a while she became ‘famous’, a Leeds brand, degree courses remarking on her presence in portfolios every year as if her image was an integral part of a Jacob Kramer Foundation experience, that and the vast sea of charcoal of course.

As years went by Anne started to become disturbed by the introduction of computers. The first ones to come in were put in a room directly below the models’ changing room. By then (it must be about 1993/4) I was line managing all the models, (only Anne and Mavis were left now, Rosie had moved to Harrogate) and had to deal with any issues that came up. Life-room etiquette mainly, but other interesting issues such as where does a life-model smoke? Anne of course still carrying on smoking as she modeled, or trying to, the new regulations about non smoking environments were just coming in and as far as she was concerned, these regulations were for other people not her.

The computers were praying on Anne’s mind. She was starting to get voices in her head and she believed that the computers were trying to take her over. This went on for a while and I tried to get the models’ room moved, but by then Mavis was getting ‘wobbly’. She was unable to stop shaking, and as she had started putting a bit of weight on over the years, the wobble caused her whole body to move as if she was a jelly on a vibrator. A challenge to draw if there ever was one. Eventually as the two of them were getting close to 60, they were pensioned off and the college would never again have life models. The life room went and was never replaced; the idea of life drawing falling out of the curriculum like so many things. Anne was probably right about those computers, they were taking over. Room after room of them now exist, but nowhere to draw.

Anne was essential to the life-drawing sessions, not just as a model, but as someone who willingly participated in all the odd and strange things she was asked to do.

Another time in the future perhaps for a blog post on life drawing classes though. I’m bitter about their demise, and think that something has gone that linked the process of becoming an art student back into the dim past. They were sessions I used to love. You could slowly build up students’ ability to see, and at the same time add layer after layer of concepts and ideas about looking and use the form of the model as a sort of coat-hanger for ideas. Not perhaps the traditional idea of why and how a life-room should be used, but it was used and very well I thought.