Two days a week, Kristen Baker, a senior studio art major, attends a class in the Fine Arts Building. Unlike the rest of the students in the class, however, she does not come prepared with pencils, charcoal and paper. She brings only herself and, when she gets there, she simply takes off all of her clothes.
Baker is paid by the art department to model nude for ARTS 372, a Life Drawing course. There she settles herself on a block in the middle of the classroom, holding poses anywhere from five minutes to an hour, as 15 or so students observe and depict the lines, curves and movement of her still body on paper.
Despite being an art major, Baker does not only bare all for the sake of art ‘ this is her job. The art department hires students to pose nude for art classes and pays $10 per hour, a salary superior to that of most on-campus jobs.
There are not very many students willing to take on this job. It requires confidence and poise. Baker was nervous when she first began modeling this semester.
‘I thought it would be horrible,’ she said.
Yet she found after very little time into her first session ‘ even with some of her classmates from other courses ‘ that it’s ‘not so bad.’
Instead, she said, ‘It’s interesting to see how people see me.’
She is acquainted with the Life Drawing professor, Don DeMauro, as well. Ten minutes after the class is over, Baker returns to the same classroom, fully clothed, to participate in DeMauro’s mixed media course, one of her registered courses. She prefers modeling for a class taught by someone she knows.
‘I am more comfortable with a professor I know than with someone I don’t know,’ she said.
The Fine Arts professors have certain expectations when they are assigned a model for their classes. George Dugan, who instructs drawing and painting courses, desires a model with a ‘sense of presence.’
‘There is a difference between naked and nude. I don’t want someone who is naked, someone who is shy,’ Dugan said.
According to Dugan, more students learn from the living human figure in a way that he or she cannot learn from a photograph or still-life. He finds that the student becomes ‘attached’ to the model, whereas he or she is indifferent to an inanimate object.
‘There is an unspoken dialogue between the model and the student,’ he said.
The students, both male and female, tend to have respect for the models and feel at ease studying the nude body.
‘I was taken aback,’ said Maxann Luchkowec, a sophomore, referring to the first time she was presented with a nude model in drawing class. ‘I felt uncomfortable the first class, but by the end I looked at the model as if it were anything else I would draw, not a naked person.’
She also finds observing the living figure to be very helpful.
‘Clothes take away from the true form,’ she said. However, when asked if she would take her clothes away to reveal her true form for a class, Maxann didn’t take a moment’s hesitation with her response: ‘No.’
According to Baker, there are some negative aspects of this job, she often finds it hard to relax. During the longer poses in particular, she finds parts of her body begin to ache. However, she makes the point that, like most college students, ‘I need any money I can get,’ and she said these slight difficulties are worth it.