This report is taken from PN Review 280, Volume 51 Number 2, November - December 2024.
Ass in the air: Live drawing
I’ve been asked to draw outdoors, for a thing (unpaid). Drawing the naked model in life class, we have tea and biscuits. Out in the wild I’m offered fags and weed.
My territory is a market expanse bare of stalls for half the week in the shadow of the Westway, the A40, where it flies over Portobello Road in Notting Hill. This part of London is misrepresented in a popular film which shows no black people anywhere.
A white man under the influence is lying on the pavement with a zipped suitcase full of paperbacks. He tries to stand up for a paramedic and the police. His trousers slip down to reveal his bare buttocks. This is not a metaphor for publishing.
To the muffled swish and rumble of traffic above, people tell me about their lives as I sketch them.
A trim elegant Rasta presents himself: ‘I clean vehicles for a living and play reggae very loud.’ His name is Egbert Knight Polycarp Glasgow. ‘They say I should write my life story but too many people gonna get hurt. I left St Lucia on the eighth of January 1959 by boat. My first address here was 19 Colville Square.’
That is, he arrived aged fifteen, the year after the Notting Hill race riots. Colville ward was one of the centres of violence. The first Notting Hill street carnival was held in 1966.
Egbert, awake and slumped asleep, is my star model over the summer. After I draw him for the final time, he ...
My territory is a market expanse bare of stalls for half the week in the shadow of the Westway, the A40, where it flies over Portobello Road in Notting Hill. This part of London is misrepresented in a popular film which shows no black people anywhere.
A white man under the influence is lying on the pavement with a zipped suitcase full of paperbacks. He tries to stand up for a paramedic and the police. His trousers slip down to reveal his bare buttocks. This is not a metaphor for publishing.
To the muffled swish and rumble of traffic above, people tell me about their lives as I sketch them.
A trim elegant Rasta presents himself: ‘I clean vehicles for a living and play reggae very loud.’ His name is Egbert Knight Polycarp Glasgow. ‘They say I should write my life story but too many people gonna get hurt. I left St Lucia on the eighth of January 1959 by boat. My first address here was 19 Colville Square.’
That is, he arrived aged fifteen, the year after the Notting Hill race riots. Colville ward was one of the centres of violence. The first Notting Hill street carnival was held in 1966.
Egbert, awake and slumped asleep, is my star model over the summer. After I draw him for the final time, he ...
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