The Star by Hackney Downs, 8 April 2025

14 Apr 2025

This booking at The Star by Hackney Downs – my first of the year – extended a run of having modelled there at least once a year, every year, since 23 April 2015. It’s my longest such sequence at any venue. And this evening was one of the best.

I’ve always loved the space, the format, the ambience, the people, the playlist; in fact everything about how Drawing the Star is organised and manifests. What made this evening special, however, is that it was literally a full house: not one place vacant.

Two free seats at the outset were filled by latecomers before the break. Another artist who arrived during the second half had either to stand or find room on the floor. I love seeing exemplary life drawing groups flourish. Sold out! Standing-room only! Yeah!

After almost thirteen years of modelling for scores of groups, I can speculate on what might make some life drawing groups more successful than others, but I still have no idea what drives the week-by-week peaks and troughs of artists’ attendance.

The only consistent patterns I observe are that when attendance is high, models tend to congratulate the organiser whilst organisers tend to credit to the model. Vice versa, organisers despair of their uncompetitiveness, models blame their own undesirability.

Nevertheless, setting aside all such glibness on our tendencies to paranoia, praise or modesty, it’s an empirical truth that from so much time and effort put into creating this community, if anyone deserves the success of sell-out sessions it’s Catherine Hall.