Day 180

Leah at the window

The chalk pastel is a wonderful medium, I have just discovered it, never really used it before. 

I caught an earlier train today and Tim met me at the station and we had a brief respite between other Things that have to be done.  So we went for an ice-cream, which we ate sitting on the bench outside the ice-cream place, with the late light spreading its beneficent glow around us.  We told of our days, him ferrying boys and fighting with Leo, the person who sold us the dud car.  I told how there is a Fransiscan priest in our group, which seems like a strange kind of thing for a Catholic priest to be doing.

Tim asked me what the point of drawing naked people is, and I have been thinking a lot about that.  I think it is because this is the purest form of a person, and if you want to draw people you have to know all their ins and outs, the way their muscles hold up their limbs, the way skin sags or tightens, the planes of the body and the face.  And every time you draw anything, including the human body, you are struck by beauty.  The beauty of shadows, of long fingers and stubby toes, of breasts with large round nipples, of a penis sitting on its testicle-nest, of the light captured in a pony-tail of brown hair, of wrinkles and ankles and the weirdness of elbows.

So here is another pastel portrait of Leah, looking as though she is sitting on the edge of a swimming pool.