naked! art! yay!

As i entered adulthood, one of the thoughts that bounced around my head from time to time was a curiosity about the world of the art model. Mostly, this curiosity was just a response to living in a sexually-repressed society, where nudity taboos are everywhere you look. I realized at a pretty young age how destructive these taboos are...that the damage done to our psyches by not being allowed to walk down the street, run with the wind, or dance in the rain naked naked naked, is almost incalculable. By the time i was an adult, i was ready to buck these taboos wherever i could. Any pretext to get naked, no matter how flimsy, i'll take (one of the possible titles for this blog was "sensitivenakedman"). I've never lived in a nudist colony, but it's on my short list. A lot of people perceive this facet of my personality as "exhibitionism", a form of attention-seeking.
A lot of people are pretty fucking stupid.

So doing naked modeling was in the back of my mind for years. Not just being naked, but being paid for it? Are you kidding?
Still, i knew how deep-rooted is the socialization that teaches us bodily shame. I couldn't be 100% sure that i would be comfortable taking off my clothes for a roomful of clothed strangers.
Just 99.999%.
Then one day, i'm looking through the want ads in Florida, seeking supplemental income for my acting. And there it was - "Art Models Wanted". A local art league. A quick phone call, and...
Know how some things you think are going to be cool, turn out to be even cooler?
I was so unself-conscious, it was silly. The artists were so friendly and fun. I was naked with strangers in public, and NOBODY CARED. When they put money in my hands, i may have laughed. Would i like to do it again? Are you kidding?
Years later, i've been professionally naked all over the place. For individual artists. For art leagues and colleges. For illustrators, painters, photographers, and sculptors.

Is it hard work? Brutal. Sometimes the poses are short, five minutes or less, but for serious work, they want you to stay unmoving for a long time. The industry standard is twenty minutes on, ten minutes off. With classes, they usually time that pretty strictly. With individual artists, i've gone an hour or more. But even twenty minutes is seventeen more than lots of folks could handle. You might never have realized how constantly humans shift our bodies, even in the most relaxed moments. We're designed that way...optimal blood flow and muscle comfort involves almost continual motion (look at speeded-up tapes of people "not doing anything" sometime). To suddenly freeze that natural state is, well...unnatural. To do it well requires muscle tone and pain tolerance.
The industry standard is a three-hour shift, but i've been asked to do as many as eight. Mostly, you're asked to do one pose over and over and over again. You quickly learn where the pain points are. You learn what part of you is going to fall asleep, over and over and over again. Very occasionally you'll have a pose that qualifies as easy...usually involving about thirty pillows. But generally, even poses that start out comfortably are killers by the second hour. When the break comes, you can't just stand up. You need to slowly unfold out of the pose. You spend your break stretching and moving and slapping whatever part of your body has fallen asleep. Ten minutes is almost never enough time to feel normal again. After an hour or so in one pose, you won't feel "normal" until the next day.
Even with all that, there are times when staying awake on the stand isn't easy. There can be something so deliciously soporific about forced inactivity.

And the most-common question of people who have never done it is, of course...do you get erect? No no no no no. What a silly idea. I mean, okay, maybe once in those hundreds of times, i started to feel a little blood flowing into my "area"...but i thought about Margaret Thatcher, and was fine. I don't think i'm atypical, i'm pretty sure erections are almost unheard-of. Which is actually a tiny bit surprising, because another question i get is, what do you think about while you're up there?
Mostly bad pop songs from the eighties.
Plus any of the million other things people think of when they're not thinking of anything. Since sex is pretty high on that list, you'd think there might be the occasional erection. There are certainly other public occasions...say, on a subway car, when you get a little chubby as you're dozing, or become aware that the nipples of the woman across from you aren't as innocuous as they were a couple minutes before.
But really, no. There's something inherently non-turgid about being naked for strangers while in pain.
You do learn, however, that you might want to avoid sex before a session. Drippage.
And i do confess i occasionally, surreptitiously "straighten" my penis, which tends to flop to the right.
Do i ever do clothed modeling? Yeah, but i really have to like the artist a lot.

A big part of the reason why modeling is even cooler than you'd imagine, is the work being done. Even with amateurs, there is something going on that is enormously ego-stroking. To walk around and see ten or twenty versions of "you" is a bit of a rush. And if the artists have actual talent, it becomes...there's no other word than "humbling". Never mind what the artistic object is, just being witness to beauty in creation, is amazing. I've amassed a nice collection of images of myself. Artists generally love to be generous with that sort of thing, making you copies and sometimes even giving originals.
I once spent a week posing with two women, but not intimately. After hundreds and hundreds of experiences, posing intimately with a woman is the only thing i've never yet done. I'm looking forward to that as the pinnacle of my career.

Any particularly goofy or special memories?
I once posed for a college art class, and one of the female students turned out to have been a high school student of mine, from a year or two before. I wish i could have a transcript of any phone calls she made after class.
I've done body double work for Brad Pitt.
I've been made into a statue by one of Hollywood's top body-casters, an experience that's worth an article all by itself (http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2009/06/statue.html).
I've had a beautiful rendering of my erect penis done (in larger than life size). If you come across that one...
Make me a copy. I never got one.

(Clothed modeling? Look again.)