Bathed in daylight and unnaturally still, Jim Brosseau resembles a marble statue. His hands are interlocked behind his head; his elbows jut in opposite directions, one toward the skylight above him and one toward the platform on which he stands.
The artists are a group of only four or five today. They gaze at Brosseau on his stage from their stools in the center of the room, easels and sketchpads before them.
They observe his bare back, his bent knees, the shadows cast by his shoulders and arms. They lift their drawing tools and measure Brosseau’s torso, the relative length of his thighs. The whisper of pencil on paper is the only sound. Brosseau will hold this pose for five minutes.
The Chester I. Solomon life drawing sessions, of which this is one, occur on Tuesdays and Fridays from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. year-round at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum. Hired models hold long poses on Tuesdays and short poses on Fridays in a small room off the main hallway on an upper floor. The cost for artists is $15 per session. The models are paid $32 an hour.
The models are nude. The artists examine their every angle. “Inevitably,” says Brosseau, “it forces you to question how you feel about your body.”
Brosseau, who is 72 and lives in Provincetown, says he’s “no Adonis.” But he’s been modeling at PAAM for eight years. He knows what to do: his arms are graceful as he switches his pose; his feet move with artful purpose; he’s in the zone.
“One of the greatest compliments I’ve gotten is when people say, ‘Are you a dancer?’ ” says Brosseau. He’s not — he’s a pianist and a career journalist, the author of plays and a musical.
Twenty-nine-year-old Colin Murphy, who lives in Provincetown and does technology and hospitality work, has been told he moves like a dancer, too. “I’ve never done dance,” he says. He trains at Mussel Beach Health Club “specifically for physique and aesthetics.” Figure modeling keeps him motivated, he says. It’s where he can present his body.
He’ll lunge and twist, stretch and contract. “Standing on the platform and reaching over like you’re reaching into a pond is a good way to show your lats,” he says.
“It’s a lot more comfortable than I would have imagined,” says Murphy. “I thought there would be a big leap. But I feel as though I don’t need to go out of my comfort zone to do what I want to do, to present my body to the artists.”
Sam Sewell, who describes themself as “gender-playful,” is 37 years old and lives in Provincetown. They do figure modeling all over the Cape and at PAAM. They weren’t as open as a kid, says Sewell. “The more I got accustomed to being free with my body, the more I felt something very strong rise within me,” they say. Now modeling nude is no sweat. “I think if I had to walk naked down the street, I’d probably be fine.”
Sewell was a lifelong athlete. “I like to push my boundaries,” they say. “The more I model, the more I learn about myself.” They like staying very still, thinking about life, meditating on a personal problem. “Then, all of a sudden, the time has passed.”
Sewell likes being a “thread through the fabric” of this artist colony, and they’re happy to help the artists in their practice. “That’s what it is, and it’s beautiful,” they say. “It’s just practice.”
Racine Oxtoby is 35 and has been modeling for only a year and a half. She lives in Truro and works as the outreach coordinator at the Wellfleet Public Library. She’s also an actor at the Provincetown Theater and a writer.
“The physicality kind of came naturally to me,” she says. It takes imagination to find the right pose. She’s improved since she started modeling.
It’s not that Oxtoby loves being naked, she says — though “there’s something freeing about it.” She likes the quiet. “It’s two hours of my life where it’s complete silence, except for the scribbling of pencils. It’s weirdly comforting.”
While Brosseau generally avoids viewing the art that emerges from his sessions — “I feel there’s a certain voyeurism about that,” he says — Oxtoby likes to look. The artist’s vision of her body is always different from what she expected, she says. And that’s just fine with her. “I want to be who the artist wants me to be at that moment.”
The whole experience is a collaboration, says Brosseau. “The joy of any collaboration is making something great together,” he says.
But modeling is not “pure joy” all the time, he says. “It’s work.” To hold any pose for 20 minutes is no small feat. And there are moments of awkwardness, especially in a small town. More than once, says Brosseau, he has worried about his neighbors showing up.
Once, at the Fine Arts Work Center, where he also models, he saw an acquaintance going into the studio. “I thought, ‘Oh, gee, she’s going to be one of the artists,’ ” he says. “Well, guess what? She was one of the models.” The instructor for the session wanted two models: a man and a woman who would pose together without touching. Brosseau asked the instructor for advice. “She said, ‘Just pretend you’re an old married couple.’ And I said, ‘Great! Now we don’t have to look at each other.’ ”
In the studio at PAAM, Brosseau is stepping off the platform for a break. An artist leaves the room to use the bathroom; the door shuts loudly. On the easels and strewn on the floor there are busy pages: sketched bodies crowding each other; faces overlapping in dreamy confusion.
“So often we live in the future,” says Brosseau, “and so often we live in the past.” Similar to when he plays piano, he says, when he’s modeling, “I’m in that moment. There’s no tomorrow, no yesterday. It’s right now.”
Like Oxtoby, Brosseau says he loves the silence. But, he adds, it’s not really silent in the room. “I love the sound of pencils on paper,” he says. “The sounds of creaking easels, even people’s easels falling on the floor. Just those gentle sounds. When the weather’s warm and the windows are open and you hear the wind or the ferry blow its whistle.”
