Chiaroscuro

            I had to work early on Monday so I rushed through most of song practice. I wolfed down some yogourt with honey and bananas but I had to leave a full cup of coffee I’d just made when it was time to go. It hadn’t snowed for a while and so lately I’ve been able to wear my Blundies, which are easier to slip on and off, instead of the Kodiaks when I ride.

            The sign-in sheet for that week hadn’t yet been put into the sign-in folder at the security desk, as is often the case on Monday mornings, but since I’d be in on Tuesday as well I could sign for both days next time. But because the sheet wasn’t there I had to dig my planner out to find out which room I’d written down.

            I worked a full day for Greg Damery. I think that Greg is a very good teacher because he knows a lot about what he’s teaching and he explains it well. But Greg never stops talking and moves, sometimes in mid sentence, from telling a student about anatomy or how to paint or draw to some other topic that has suddenly come to his mind, and then he makes a comment or asks a question about something else followed by a short conversation on the subject before seamlessly returning to where he left off in the instruction. It might sometimes go something like, “Chiaroscuro was developed during the Renaissance and it’s the treatment of contrasting light and shade that has fallen unevenly from a particular direction on the model. How long have you been modeling, Christian? Me: I started in 1982. Greg: Wow! I graduated from here in 1982. Me: I did take five years off though. Greg: What did you do? Me: I moved furniture mostly, bussed tables and became a waiter for a few months, but I also tried to work as a photographer’s assistant for a year. Greg: When I was sixteen I worked for a moving company and on my first day the driver told me to get out of the truck on Bloor Street and stop traffic for him. I was terrified! So, Chiaroscuro uses strong tonal contrasts to dramatically model three-dimensional forms.” And all this time he would be demonstrating the technique on the student’s drawing pad.

            When I took a break we talked a little more about furniture moving. I told him that nobody can swamp furniture for very long without developing a bad back. I related the story of a middle aged French Canadian guy that I’d worked with who had to take so many painkillers that he was always high. One time we were following a woman up her stairs as she was showing us what to move. He reassured her we’d take good care of her stuff and gave her a pat on the behind at the same time. Greg laughed.

            I posed for one long portrait for the day with just my shirt off, but I found myself feeling drowsy almost from the start. For the most part I was able to nonetheless maintain the pose, but every now and then my eyes would shut and my head would drop forward for a split second. Mostly though my head stayed in position while for brief moments my eyes would shut before I caught myself and opened them again. Greg didn’t seem bothered by it and he even seemed to have worked out my rhythm, so that when he was with a student and working on my eyes and they close, he’d just say, “Wait a second … Okay, he’s back.” At every five-minute break I tried a couple of different things to counteract the sleepiness. Splashing cold water on my face sometimes does the trick, but this time it didn’t help. I tried lying down for a four-minute sleep and I actually did sleep a bit and even once had a dream about the grey haired, red-faced, schizophrenic woman that I used to see a lot at the food bank before it moved up to Queen last year. There was no story to the dream though, I just saw her wearing a polyester coat with a hood tightly tied over her head, that I only revealed her face.

            It was only during my one-hour lunch break that I was able to get enough sleep so that I was able to, for the most part, hold my eyes open for the afternoon session.

            On the way home it was starting to snow. I stopped at Freshco where I bought cherries and yogourt. They still had chicken drumsticks for sale but I decided not to buy any because I still had some I’d cooked, which would be enough for that night and since I’d be out Tuesday and Wednesday nights there would be no time to cook more. When I got home I defrosted a Black Forest ham that I’d gotten from the food bank.

            I watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory. The second one had Amy and Sheldon begin a project together of using neuroscience and quantum physics to disprove the theory that consciousness causes collapse in the process of quantum measurement.