There was another model who worked with me sometimes, a man who was nearly ninety. During the summers, he and his wife traveled around the country in their RV, visiting museums where he studied the masters. Not to learn to paint or sculpt, but to learn the poses. He was the carpenter’s hammer, he told me, or the nail. He had a binder full of Polaroids of the poses he had mastered. There he was, an ancient David, a wizened Augustus, a grizzled Thinker.
