captive audience

Today I sat in on a life drawing class again (a perk of my introductory drawing class). Our model was a Haitian woman, who chose an extremely difficult set of poses for us to draw. "Oh, this is so hard," mourned my introductory drawing comrade, gamely drawing next to me. "It's harder for me, to hold it," the model informed him.

In my brief experience of life drawing, the models have been silent during the poses other than to give time warnings ("One minute!"), but quite chatty during the breaks. Today, during the last scheduled pose, a twenty minute long pose, the model gave us, all of whom were silent as we concentrated on our drawing, an impromptu lecture on Haiti's relationship with the U.S., using the word "fucking" quite a few times, ending with a rousing assertion that the U.S., along with France and Canada, has stripped Haiti of all its gold.

I found this a fascinating twist on the usual artists-staring-at-naked-person power dynamic.