The Victoria Stakes, London, 8 October 2018

It’s an endearing quirk of some artists that they can fly with endless imagination when creating new works, yet are soon emitting unsettled murmurs if anyone dares suggest a new sequence of pose times for a life drawing group. So discovered Harriet, stand-in facilitator for The Moon and Nude at The Victoria Stakes. Her heretical proposal to try starting with a 15-minute pose and a few 2-minute poses was swiftly abandoned in favour of the traditional first-half format of 1-minute, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 15 and 20-minutes…

In fairness, it was all good-humoured and Harriet did an outstanding job of running the session this evening. The artists were on form too, present in good numbers and even going so far as to give appreciative applause at the end of individual poses rather than wait till our 9pm finish. Possibly unprecedented! During the half-time break, I checked out their artworks – particularly keen to see where the ripping sounds had come from. No, it wasn’t constant dissatisfaction with drawings; rather, some incredible collages.

After the interval we resumed with a 30-minute pose – for which one artist kindly leant me his walking stick – and still had enough time for two poses of 5-minute and one of 2-minutes. Someone called out “could one of them be standing?” Having stood for the previous half-hour I might have been spared that imposition, but in truth I’d intended to stand for one anyway. Three shapes later, we were done. The mood remained positive throughout, hopefully making it a fruitful session for all involved – not least, Harriet.