Life modelling and the perception of time

I was life modelling this morning for a group in Bassendean, Perth, WA... they're sweet, this is my second week in a row with them and I've been invited back to next week.

This time, I took some photos of their artworks.

In essence, life modelling is about creating a pose that is interesting for artists to engage drawing with.

We start with a series of short poses, and sketches, such as these, are done to "warm up". 

Series of 8x 1 minute poses

Then go into 5 minute poses... I did 3 x 5 minute poses in the session this morning....

Then a 10 minute and a 20 minute pose. In the second half, we did 3 x 30 min poses.

It was during the first 30 minute pose that I began to lose my mind. I was impatient, because I put myself into a position that, quite frankly, one is not able to hold for 30 minutes... so I found myself trying to count the seconds...

There was some music playing in the background, an old recording of "Danny Boy" (I prefer this Sinead O'Connor version)... and the frantic sound of the scraping and rubbing of charcoal, pencil, pen on the paper.

The pace of the music, soft and laconic juxtaposed with the hurried scraping of the 20 or so artists creating works, different again to the time denoted by the seconds-hand imagined in my head, and of course the experience of time I was having as the urgency of pain and discomfort was at odds with the inherent stillness of mind and body experienced as a life model, beads of sweat from the effort trickling down my otherwise unmoving body.

What a composition of time perception. I feel like the seconds drag weighted with the concentration and pain of cramping limbs. The students feel the seconds fleet by, the deadline of the timer rushing to them as they try to complete their works before the 30 minute mark. The clock doesn't give a fuck what's happening and the soft laconic music creates a twisted over-arching warp of the whole temporal experience enabling a flux within my reality perception making me wonder if the seconds are truely measured as my perception is under strain from so many external forces.

Or maybe I'm just a bit sensitive to the polyrhythmic nature of being, hence why I notate so much of it in my work!

In any case, it was just an awesome observation... I recommend trying to be still for 20 mins, truely absolutely unblinkingly still, and perceive the paces of various components of your world (how quickly the duck swims by, how quickly are the ants scurrying around, how fast the clouds roll)... what sounds are made, in your mind, by all these elements?

Time to compose.