All Night Long

That’s how long I felt I could keep going after my last gig. It was amazing! I held one long pose for most of the session, and I actually felt even better after the end of the session than I did before.

You see, I did a session the night before over at the Hillyer, and as stated in a previous post, I really did a number on my lower back. The poses weren’t even anything particularly wild or crazy, but as you model, you’ll notice that sometimes even if you do a relatively simple pose, you can really put your body through the ringer.

As I got to my session at VisArts (organized by Ricardo Pontes), I was a little bit nervous as my back was still tight as a drum, and I was afraid the state of my muscles was going to interfere with my poses. I met with the coordinator, Martin, and made small talk with him as I have a painful habit of showing up royally early to gigs (I am terribly, horribly afraid of being late, and I’d rather arrive an hour early than even five minutes late).

He cautioned me that there were a lot of artists who said they weren’t going to be able to make it. This isn’t terribly unusual. In fact, I’ve found that late summer gigs tend to foster a sparse turnout because people are trying to squeeze their vacations into the waning days of summer (I’ve also noticed that if a gig happens to be during the first good day of Spring, there will similarly be low turnout). But I told him I’m happy to model for one person or one hundred, and truth be told, I find smaller gigs to be more intimate in the sense that there’s enhanced collaboration between artist and model, and sometimes we deviate from the proposed schedule of poses to accommodate what people in the room want.

At VisArts, we typically do five 5-minute poses followed by one long pose for 20 minutes for the rest of the session. Martin asked me if I’d be up for a kneeling pose for the long pose, or if that would be difficult, and I told him that, in all honesty, kneeling poses give my knees and back grief for more than a few minutes. I hate to have to say things like that, but I know that if I hold a kneeling pose for 10 minutes, towards the end my legs and back are bucking like a bronco, and I know I won’t be able to give my best. While I always say that you should, to the extent feasible, do the poses that are suggested for you, you need to know your own body and its limitations and to work with the coordinator or professor to come up with a pose that works for the two of you.

Martin was totally sympathetic and suggested a seated pose, which we agreed to hash out after the five minute poses, at which point I’d get a quick break and then get ready for the long pose.

To my surprise, we had plenty of artists turn out! I’d say around 10 or so, which was a lot more than Martin or I were anticipating. In fact, I recognized three people from the previous night at the Hillyer come out to VisArts. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. I mean occasionally I’ll run into someone that’s drawn me at one venue and I see at another venue in the future. But not the next day, and not three people! And VisArts is a decent hike from downtown DC where the Hillyer is located, so I was pleasantly surprised to see them again.

When 6:30 rolled around, I dropped my robe and got down to business. For the five minute poses, I did four standing poses and one seated one. Oh man, my back was absolutely KILLING me 😦 At the end of the last pose, I think I got out of position as soon as the timer went off, which is something that I almost never do.

Martin decided I should do a pose sitting upright on a chaise, and I’d splay my legs and put a decent twist into the pose. I would be seated with my rump against the very back of the chaise, sitting up straight.

This was easily the most comfortable pose I’ve ever been in! In fact, Martin was initially a bit concerned about it, asking me several times if this pose was kosher for me and if I’d be comfortable holding it for the rest of the session (with breaks every 20 minutes, of course).

I kid you not, as soon as I got into pose, the pose I was in stretched out every single muscle that was aching. It felt amazing! Each 20 minute segment just flew by, like it was only five minutes in length.

In fact, after I started to take off my robe for the last segment, I noticed we had 30 minutes left. So I told Martin I could go for the last half hour if he was okay with it. He asked me if I wanted to go for 15 minutes, shake out real quick, and then got into pose again, and I told him I could hold it for the full 30 minutes.

That last 30 minutes went by so fast it felt even quicker than the 20 minute segments!

And when I got out of pose at the end of the night, I had no pain anymore. None. At all. That’s really never happened to me. Even when you have good nights where you give amazing poses and don’t really feel any severe pain, you’ll typically find your body to be stiff for a few minutes afterwards. But I felt perfectly fine. My pain was all gone.

I really felt that I could have kept on going for a few more hours, as I was having a great time, was in absolutely no pain, and really didn’t have any gigs on the radar screen (still don’t for the most part, though I suspect I’ll be getting busy shortly as art schools start booking models).

I never talked about why I call this blog Jason and the Golden Pose. Part of it is a silly take-off of Jason and the Golden Fleece. But I always wondered what it would be like to hold a pose that caused me no pain. To where I’d be able to get back into pose time and time and time again to the point where I’d feel just as good walking out of the session as I did coming into it.

It’s always a special thing when you work a gig and your body feels good when you leave for the day. When you feel you can keep on going and in fact feel a bit sad that the session has to come to an end and you have to get back in your civilian attire and go back home.

That’s what it felt like this night. That I could go on all night long and be perfectly content and at peace doing so 🙂