Civil Service Club, London, 18 July 2016

“Do your toes always cross like that or have you done it for the pose?” – this was the question put to me by Eddie, the group organiser, as a I settled down for my eleventh piece of the evening. When getting into a pose, my focus is on composition, balance, pressure points and support, so sometimes I miss the details of my own body. Eddie hadn’t, though. As I sat naked for 15 minutes, he concentrated on drawing one foot.

I was back in Westminster for a return to the Civil Service Club. As is typical among life drawing groups in the summer months, the number of artists was about half what it had been in late spring – just Eddie and three others, all friendly regulars. The evening was warm and the windows cast open; our serenity was disturbed only by rowdy UKIP supporters outside who were yelling incoherently like drunken hooligans throughout.

The three-hour session was well structured: five 2-minute poses, two 10-minute poses and four 15-minute poses, up to a half-hour break. Two of my toes crossed for the last of these – I believe they just do that of their own accord. After the interval, we finished with three 20-minutes poses, albeit the third was trimmed to quarter of an hour. It was a good session, pure life modelling, enjoyable to create a varied set of poses.