Lessons Learnt From Being Naked in Front of Strangers

As a professional naked body, I feel I have some insight to this experience for which I am grateful. Having spent 3 years working as a life model for art schools,  famous galleries and tertiary institutions around Sydney I have been fortunate to accumulate a wealth of experiences and lessons. It is something I would thoroughly recommend. 

This job gave me a story, gave me confidence, gave me humility, gave me empowerment and gave me fragility. 

Often when I tell people I'm a naked model they tell me that it is something they would really be interested in doing!

Here's how I started: I wrote to the fine art department of the main universities in Sydney saying that I was a naked model and looking to work at their institution. Then, some wrote back. 

For some there was specific paperwork to fill in, and they didn't call me for almost a year! But once I got that first job the rest kept on coming a flowing from one context to the next. You meet contacts at one school and you get another lead, and surely if I devoted more time and energy in to seeking I could have been very busy.

I had to sit a formal panel interview for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. By such a time I had really become very professional. I feel proud to be a very capable life model- that is, my poses are interesting and strong; my meditation helps me to sit for extended periods of time in one position, and I always receive positive feedback from students and staff. The work that is involved  in being still is quite considerable. You are naked, often cold, always cramping, loosing feeling, or having pain and it can be quite isolating. 

But for all these things it is amazing to see the drawings produced. Not for a recreation of yourself but to see just exactly what an artist can produce based on you being in front of them. It's not just your body, it's your essence and your energy.

Some students told me they love to draw me.

One student that she loved to draw my skin tone.

A sketch club group student told me he enjoys drawing me because I have a look like a Greek 

Goddess!

Teachers that request me personally for their classes.

It's a beautiful compliment. It's not about drawing what you look like, it's about drawing what they see. What I love about their drawings is that they are always a proportion of their unique style of drawing and carry some part of my unique style of being. Sometimes it's the colour combinations, sometimes it's the strokes, there's so many endless combinations. No two are ever alike. 

I'm never alike.

You're never alike.

There is so much beauty in individual perceptions. In the silence and the stillness and the realness and openness there is something liberating, empowering, exposing, disempowering. Something to overcome and in the end you have informed the creation of beauty, and you BROUGHT the beauty all along, the same with the artist. In the stage of life, be both the actor and the audience. Act and Witness your actions. 

Every body is a work of art. Every form is perfection.


I remember being on a train one day on my way to 'work' with a terrible pimple on my face above my lip. I remember thinking, what a job I have where this pimple could not go less noticed.

One class I had a teacher (from whom I learnt a wealth of drawing techniques, by proxy) who instructed his class to place their pencil on their paper and to trace the shape of 'the figure' without lift it from the page and with their eyes fixed on 'the figure' and having no sight of their drawing. Naturally the drawings produced were feo scribbles and nonsensical outlines and they were beautiful to me. Imagine a class of 30 strangers intently staring at you naked over every 'bump' and 'curve' as he put it. When the teacher did an example he narrated his tracing, when it came to drawing my little toe, my foot twitched, unintentionally, as if I felt his eyes and presence. It was an exercise in presence, and these exercises I have very much come to appreciate. It's not the end product. It's not having something in mind and making it your business to draw a beautiful drawing. It's about drawing beautifully, with your full attention and presence, not just what you think you see, and letting the draw shape itself. This is truth.