The Prince Regent, Herne Hill, 30 January 2019

“Just confirming you are all good for modelling this Wednesday evening. I’m afraid the heating upstairs is not great…“. So began the email from SketchPad Drawing group organiser, Lisa two days before my booking at The Prince Regent pub in Herne Hill. This was slightly ominous as forecasts had it to be the coldest night of the year.

As ever, there would be two models alternating between two rooms. The group’s best heater was put in the coldest room whilst I would be starting in the marginally warmer room with a lone fan heater and a hot water bottle. I managed to incorporate the latter into one of my opening short poses: three of 5-minutes, two of 3-minutes.

Two poses of 15-minutes finished the first half. For the first I sat on the arm of a couch and stretched one leg on to a table in front. For the second I’d intended to stand but in the end I eschewed the idea and instead lingered low beside the heater. To be fair I’ve had colder nights modelling – I felt I was winning the battle for warmth here.

In her emails, Lisa had said it would be fine for me to wear warm, colourful clothes but the purist in me was keen to face the challenge of making traditional nude life drawing work. Nonetheless, during the interval I was back in my robe with hot water bottle held tightly to my body whilst I checked out the artists’ work.

I concluded the evening with a single pose in the chilly room with its superior ceramic heater. Indeed, I positioned myself so near to it that I started to feel in more danger of being barbecued for 35-minutes than frozen. All was well, though. A session that had augured much midwinter misery, turned out – against all odds – to be very enjoyable.