Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation

187. AN ART SCHOOL EDUCATION - 'Sex is Like...' (Jan 1968):

Sex is like a cardboard box – as much as you can stuff into it it will take - up to a certain point : what made me think of that was the two naked girls curled up on the old tan couch in the old studio room where some 10 or 12 people were busy sketching and painting them while an art instructor went from easel to easel and spot to spot critiquing each work in its progress – I’d never done this myself ‘painting from life’ never really having interested me since I painted an entire and different format for myself and any drawing I may have done was usually done on the fly with nothing really studiously approached or worked over – so I couldn’t tell what the point of any of this was and a few of the resultant drawings and paintings did seem the same to me anyway as they were made of of the usual jagged charcoal markings denoting the breaking down of object into form and then form into line and all that eventually ended up as much looking like a jumble of smudges and blurs as anything else (studio drawing like this was part of a grand old ‘traditional’ artist’s education in the old ‘Continental’ vein and was the one attention this school really gave to the old hoary tradition of art education – the rest being free and fluid loose and easy) and by contrast at the same time a few were painting and drawing in very true-to-life manner yet each thigh and breast and neckline was pretty much the same : how much could you do to raw unbridled nudity without advancing the pornographic angle anyway : but it was nonetheless always worth it to see the girls splayed out against one another all breasts and asses and sex and faces haphazardly displayed by ones and twos and even the guy models whether in faux-heroic stances or semi-self-conscious languid poses of informality always had a dick hanging somewhere and an expression of some lackadaisical awareness of what they were doing – egad no boners please! - so anything an instructor had to say – I thought – would be comical indeed ‘well you’ve got that pussy just right but there’s a little too much line on that guy’s cock’ or that’s how I laughed it off anyway – knowing it wasn’t really about that stuff anyway : and then that got me thinking about God again and all the cool stuff He’d supposedly made - all these bodies and swells and juices and orifices – and I wondered if that guy who’d just been talking at me had ever taken any awareness of all that as he considered the plights of both Mankind and its Gods – those Greeks on Mount Olympus seemed to fuck enough for a real tribe anyway – and human or not I wondered what he’d thought of any of this and the beautiful girls and even the not-so always attracted my attention and I loved to watch them upon completion as they slowly broke down a pose gracefully moved themselves around and then somehow always demurely put on a purple or nicely colored robe or wrap to walk out in and in which to walk off – they’d re-appear a little later nicely dressed and ready to walk outdoors and no one would ever say really a word to them about the whole scene they’d just gone through - entertainment or not as it was - the art world was weird like that – especially for 18 year old boys don’t you think?