Page 58 of The Singing Trees
“Who cares?” She looked across the giant space of the warehouse. “No one is even here yet. What are you worried about? Now, c’mon.”
Sharon closed her eyes and opened up into a star, as if nothing could hold her back. “Turn on your love light,” she said, repeating the singer from the record filling the room with sound.
With a burning face, Annalisa mimicked her. She couldn’t believe she was doing this.
“Now, breathe,” Sharon said. “Take it all in. Take in the atoms that make up all of us. Connect with me and with this music and with all the other souls out there fighting their own battles. Don’t open your eyes; just let go. Let your love light shine.”
Annalisa felt like a fool as she sucked in air. Her eyes were closed, and she was thinking that Sharon might be a bit too much when she felt the woman’s hands touch her elbows, urging her to raise her arms higher.
The touch startled her so badly that she gasped, and she jerked her arms back down as her entire body tightened. The music turned to noise and made her even more uneasy. She was so ashamed as she looked Sharon’s way, but the teacher wore a smile, as if nothing were wrong.
“Come here,” she whispered. “Take my hands.”
Annalisa felt afraid, but that was absurd. This woman holding her hands out was so utterly warm and kind.
Sharon gestured again with her fingers until Annalisa finally took Sharon’s hands. They stood three feet apart, but Annalisa felt like they were inches away. She wanted to recoil or turn or ... she had to close her eyes.
“Look at me,” Sharon said.
Annalisa opened her eyes as if there were an openmouthed snake with fangs waiting. It wasn’t a snake, though. It was Sharon’s silver eyes.
“Annalisa, you can’t connect with your subjects on canvas without connecting with people in the real world.”
As if someone had just ripped off her dress, exposing who she really was, Annalisa’s eyes watered. “I ... I ...” She’d asked for this in moving to the city, but she wasn’t sure she could handle it. She dropped her head without getting out a word.
Then Sharon took her into a hug, and all Annalisa’s troubles went away. She had never felt so safe and secure.
Annalisa felt like she’d crossed the finish line of a marathon as she took her seat on the opposite side of the warehouse, where Sharon had set up twenty chairs and easels in a horseshoe around a stage. A man in a robe sat in a chair in the center of the stage, speaking with Sharon.
Knowing the man was nude underneath that robe, Annalisa was nearly frozen with nerves. After what she’d just been through, she now had to paint her first naked man? Had she not already committed with so much money, she might have run out of there. It was too much after what Sharon had done to her. She was all about becoming better, but this was not what she’d expected on her first day with Sharon Maxwell. What happened to learning to clean your brushes or a lesson on how to thin acrylics with water?
The man looked like a Roman god, and Annalisa could only imagine what he held under his green robe. Judging by what she could see, his broad shoulders and muscular legs, he was in superb shape and well toned. The artist in her was eager to study his contours, but the girl inside wrestled with a mild form of shock. He would be the first man she’d ever seen completely bare. Oh my God, why was she so embarrassed? She was young, yes, as Sharon had said, but notthatyoung. She’d painted plenty of nude men from paintings. Still, the real thing before her was enough to make her squirm.
She looked to the other students in her class, a mix of all ages. Some chatted, some doodled on their sketch pads, and others looked toward the stage as if they couldn’t wait for the big reveal. Annalisa felt like she was certainly the most nervous of all of them.
Sharon eventually clapped her hands and commanded instant attention. Her voice echoed off the brick walls as she spoke. “My job in the coming weeks and months is to make you better painters, whatever that means to you. We’re all different, and we all have our obstacles. My hope is that we’re going to break down every one of your walls. Some of you will quit, and that’s the way the world works. I am going to tell you all how it is, and I’m going to push, and it won’t be easy. You are all wonderful artists—that’s why you’re here—but you can all be better. Even I can be better. My promise to you is that I’ll give you my all, and I want the same of you.”
After talking details about what to expect, she turned to the model and asked him to disrobe. Annalisa couldn’t believe this was happening, and by the time he’d dropped his robe off the stage and taken his pose, her jaw had hit China—or whatever was on the other side of the globe. The model was much more well endowed than the statue of David she’d painted at some point last year. He was lean with hardened ab muscles and tufts of brown hair about his ... above his ... below his belly button and across his chest.
Like a baby clawing for her pacifier, she reached for her charcoal pencil and opened up her sketchbook. She noticed some people reachedstraight for their paints. Sharon had suggested they follow whatever routine made them comfortable.
The model almost directly faced Annalisa, who now wished she’d chosen a position on the periphery of the horseshoe.Wouldn’t Emma get a kick out of this?she thought, remembering the first day Emma had come to the Mills.
She avoided his midsection like the plague as she first outlined his body and then went to work on the curvature of his lower legs, shading in the darker tones and imagining the colors she might use once she took to the paper on the easel.
Thirty minutes must have passed as everyone silently worked. Annalisa had relaxed some, having gotten used to the naked man standing before her. She’d convinced herself he was simply flesh like herself. She’d moved to the easel now and was toying with skin-tone colors when Sharon, who’d been visiting with each of them, peeking at their work, interrupted the class.
“Annalisa and I were speaking about connecting with our subjects, and I think it’s a common obstacle among you. So I’d like to do something I’ve not done before.”
Annalisa couldn’t imagine what this wild woman might suggest, and she felt her shoulders turn back to stones.
Sharon smiled, as if this were all a game. “I want you to paint the model.”
The students looked around at each other in confusion. One of the older ladies said, “Wearepainting him.”
“No,” Sharon said, clearly enjoying herself, “I want you to take your paints up to the stage and paint him. Physically touch him with your brushes.”
A collection of gasps rose up in the warehouse air.
