83a Geffrye Street, London, 15 October 2018

This session was my sixteenth in 29 days since returning to the UK from a short visit to Aarhus, Denmark. Usually I would take just one or two of bookings each week, so this has been an exceptionally busy month’s modelling on top of my regular weekday employment. After this evening, however, I have a three week hiatus; I love my artistic work, but I can’t pretend it won’t be a relief to stop burning the candle at both ends.

If this was to be my final few hours’ modelling for nearly a month, I was happy to pass that time at The Workshop in Geffrye Street, Hoxton; Adrian Dutton’s London Life Drawing groups remain a pleasure for the purist. It was already dark when I emerged from Hoxton overground station a little after 6:30pm. The long hot summer nights here were clearly behind me, yet I found the room reassuringly toasty warm when I arrived.

Opening poses were 10-minutes, 2, 2, 2, 5, 5, 15 and 18-minutes. Aiming to create a favourable first impression, I made the schoolboy error of putting too many bends and stretches in the first pose. It’s not as if I needed to show off but sometimes, when the last garment falls to the floor, the body takes its own decisions. Thereafter the priority was management of potentially fibrillating leg muscles up to the break.

After a half-hour interval, in which I was replaced centre-stage by a table of breads and dips, I completed the session with poses of 30-minutes and 28-minutes. Perhaps they both would have been 30-minutes except, just like the first half, I gave rather too much to the opening pose and needed a couple of minutes extra to recuperate. I perched on a stool till the end… then dressed, said farewells, and shuffled away for a holiday.