The Bolton, London, 17 September 2018

The Bolton, near Earl’s Court tube station, is the furthest west I’ve travelled to model for one of Adrian Dutton’s life drawing groups. Entering this grand old London pub at a quarter to seven, I gravitated intuitively up to the first floor and found their function room all set for creating art. The successful format used at Adrian’s other venues was to be reproduced here, so at 7pm we started with a warm-up 10-minute standing pose (with candelabra), and then continued: 3-minutes, 3, 3, 5, 15 and 20-minutes.

I had a couple of close encounters in the two poses before our break. Whilst sitting on the floor for 15-minutes I glimpsed a little black multi-legged thing crawling towards my buttocks. Without my glasses, I couldn’t tell if it was a spider or a fly – a swift tensing of muscles would spook the latter, but spiders can be trickier to shift. Mercifully it was a fly. Next, whilst standing I got a bump on the buttocks when an artist ran across the pose space to answer her phone, catching me with her drawing board on the way…

Two 30-minute poses completed our evening’s work after the break. A long bench with faux-leather padding was brought in to be my new platform at the centre of the room. I opted first to be seated, then finished by reclining along its length. I felt comfortable in each pose, and at the end appreciated an artist’s compliment that I’d been “as still as a glacier” – in other words, acknowledged to be moving but not sufficiently perceptible for anyone to care about. A very apt analogy for the reality of life modelling.