Tiny Nude

I brought back boxes and boxes of old photographs from the house. If I didn't gather them up and save them, they would just be thrown out. I've begun looking through them to see just what all these images are. Some boxes contain hundreds of post cards with images of famous art or sculpture on one side. I will sort through these and probably discard them as they are not worth anything even as collectables.

There were the usual family photos, often with people whom only I can identify. That is a job for later. What I didn't expect were my mother's photos of art models. I found numerous slides of the art model nudes, but I didn't know they had been printed (in my dad's home darkroom) for further use. Many of these art model images were bad to begin with, poorly printed or hard to decipher. These went into the bin. Some other images, all of them non-pornographic tasteful female nudes, went into a save file and I scanned a few of them to digital. 

These art sessions where my mother drew the model took place in a meeting room on the upper floor of an elegant Anglican church in Newton, Massachusetts during the early 1970s. Mother belonged to an art group who hired a model for their own sketch sessions. I was there for some of them and made my own drawings, but I didn't take the photos. Some of the images show the details of the room and my mother is also shown in a couple of them, drawing on a sketchpad.

This little nude study is derived from one of the model sessions. I still remember doing art there and somewhere my images from that era gather dust in my closet.

Black tech pen ink on sketchbook page, finished in Photoshop, 4 1/2" x 3 1/4", September 8, 2016.