The Royal Courts of Justice. For a change.

Kim Evans (@lifeincustody) has provided a vantage point - a room at the London School of Mediation.

Down on the pavement, protesters with a loud hailer are making unkind remarks about the senior judiciary.

Sometimes they block the traffic by jay-walking on the zebra crossing. An angry man hangs out of a delayed bus, shouting at the demonstrators.

I share the office with a  unopened jar of tapenade and the Chinese characters below.

Disjointed phrases float up from the protest:

'They legalise masturbation...'

'Sixteen sixty-six right? The great fire of London was an inside job. Poor people burned out of their homes so that these buildings could be built yeah.'

The RCJ was completed in 1882, according to the godlike Pevsner, on 'a site of specially disreputable slums.'



'Cavalier lawyer: a man who would defend
the poor or refuse to work for the corrupt'

Pevsner describes G. E Street's architecture as 'an object lesson in free composition, with none of the symmetry of the classics, yet not undisciplined where symmetry is abandoned.'

I refill my pen with malodorous ink. It's the little puddle festering in the bottom of the bottle, diluted with my paintbrush contaminant, life-class tea, which produces the softest of sepia washes.

Peter's day out at Bisley shooting range

Peter precision-shooting

For me it ends in A&E, natch, but this is about my friend Peter Sloper who wants to go to the National Rifle Association open day at Bisley in Surrey.

'I expect we'll only stay for about three hours,' he says.

By chuck-out time, with a slew of top scores and compliments from stocky, jocular gunfolk, Peter is considering taking up long-range precision shooting, joining the Artists' Rifles club, converting a derelict building in the grounds into a house for himself, and inviting friends to attend the imminent weekend of Northern soul, indie, motown and ska in the Bisley Pavilion.

But back to our arrival. We register alphabetically. He stands hopefully with me at the T-Z table. 'No, your name begins with S,' I say, my only useful contribution of the day.



Discarded target

Then breakfast on the verandah: a bacon-and-egg roll for Peter. 'Tastes a bit odd, like army food.' He manages most of it before a peppery shower of Lilliputian meteorites falls out of the sky. Onto our food. Into our tea. What the hell is that?



We walk out to the ranges. We're a bit late because Peter puts on the wrong trousers and has to repair them with needle and thread and then I get lost in the centre of Woking where I was born.

The echoes of gunshots around the sunlit downs make a beautiful looping shape. 'Like ripping air,' says Peter.

Peter asks his instructor, 'Would I be better off in reading glasses?'
Then he scores straight A's. He says he was talent-spotted when he spent a few weeks in the army cadets at the age of 14 but hasn't shot since.

Speed steels

The randomly percussive, out-of-tune speed steels are pure John Cage. You have to hit five pocked metal circles (ping! toing! plink!) in a second or two with discreetly dainty ammo favoured by the Mafia. While Peter is nailing this, I sketch.

I take up a more advantageous position. On a grassy knoll. The boss man, who has Steve Smoothy printed on his polo shirt, moves towards me slowly, avoiding eye-contact, as you would when approaching an animal. 

'It's OK, I'm a blogger,' I say, waving my unconvincing sketch book, guilty of social drawing. He explains kindly that my behaviour looks suspicious.

The place is awash with bars, cafes, eccentrically improvised club-houses and bungalows nostalgic for the Raj.  'Ooh look, there's a mop on that roof,' says Peter.

Can you spot the rooftop mop like sharp-eyed Peter?
Or indeed the architectural influences?

Time for tea in a cafe which displays its hygiene score on the wall - disappointingly not a bull's eye but four out of five. Magnum ice-cream, obviously. The toasted tea-cake is off.

Peter (left)

We don't discover the classic and historic firearms section until it's too late.

Notting Hill Carnival romance

Hippy crack canisters. I can see
blue sea, golden sand, palm tree

This year's Notting Hill Carnival is ending. I clamber out over the front garden railings as the gate is wired shut in order to stop complete strangers using the front basement area as a latrine. (Someone uses the gate itself as a bottle opener.)

I sit on a nearby low wall which, like the pavement, is covered in detritus. A large sausage bitten at one end lies near me on the wall. A young white man picks it up and walks off eating it.

I go for a wander. A barefoot girl manages to keep her hat on while vomiting.

It's impossible to keep drawing - people want to chat.

Then I'm joined by my friend who has spent the last two days dancing and helping to manage a float.

An observer

While she goes off to dance some more I am a staring point of stillness on the corner.

A tall neatly-dressed young red-headed man rounds the corner, stops, tilts his head, raises an eyebrow and offers me his arm. In a different dream I go with him.

On Beach Blanket Babylon's territory

My friend returns. We become joyful mudlarks pouncing on Caribbean flags and glittery treasure in the gutter.


Uses for the Financial Times, part 4

Protecting the kitchen table from stuff we found in the gutter after the Notting Hill Carnival.

I handled it with latex gloves and laundered the washable items, don't worry.

Uses for the Financial Times, part 3

To denote gravitas.

Nicola Streeten (who wrote the award-winning graphic novel Billy, Me and You and co-founded Laydeez do Comics with Sarah Lightman) used the FT as a symbol of high seriousness on which to rest her speech notes at the Graphic Medicine conference at Sussex University in July.

 

 

Being drawn from an uncomfortable position: the artist as model, part 2

Artists' models are like public lavatories, engaged or vacant. 

I'm at the Newlyn School of Art, working at being the kind of model I want in front of me when I'm drawing.

There's a lot to think about. Hair, jewellery, lipstick; fabric to make pools of colour. I grab a bright yellow book from the shelves for a stab of citrus. Eek - there's a snail on it. 

The star of the day turns out to be my Indian cotton sequinned loose trousers from a market in Cannes, very Matisse. It feels very daring to put clothes on.

Sunblock. The morning sunlight streams through the high schoolroom windows.

Stillness. A quarter-inch shift in my position is seismic. I can't turn to look at my hand but thumb and forefinger feel about three miles apart.



At the start of a long pose the body is light. Then it sinks and solidifies. To counter that, you imagine it filled it with swansdown, whipped egg white.

Sometimes the statue speaks. 'Degas,' I say helpfully as I go into the pose of his 14-year-old ballet dancer, arms down straight behind me. 

'Don't tread in that!' I yell as someone is about to put his foot on a splat of blue acrylic paint.

I wonder if I'll wake up and realise that I am naked in front of all these people.




I rearrange my snowdrift self. I plan two poses ahead. Short dynamic fanciful poses, long supposedly tranquil poses. You can subtly shift your centre of gravity without people noticing. You learn to pass the pain from one part of your body to another. Even so it is going to take my back three days to recover.

The teacher is Rose Hilton. Rose is revered by her students. It's fun. Time races.

I think of a short poem (brace, brace) I wrote long ago called Galatea which I thought was about some guy but turns out to be about the trippy and intense experience of modelling:

Although you've kicked away the pedestal
I will not fail or falter now
For here, raised disproportionately tall
To see, longer, further, the altered horizon,
I float,
Although marble.

I got a nice email from one of the students afterwards. She said I was a fantastic model. 'Mind you, we had this trapeze artist once...'

All pictures here are by the students.

Sitting for Rose Hilton: the artist as model

Brushmarks on glass in Rose's studio

I am in Rose Hilton's conservatory in Cornwall.

She rootles through her pastels. 'Ooh, where are my whites? I'm going to run out,' she coos, surveying my glistening alabaster, my Antarctic shelves.








 
Rose and her beau settle down to sketch me. A vine with darkening grapes shades the worst of the sun and I re-apply factor 30 during short breaks. Rose is slender and elegant in a chartreuse linen dress.

My left leg goes numb. I stand on it with all my weight. The leg returns. 

Next day I sit for Rose in her Victorian schoolroom studio in Newlyn.

Rose is abstractly figurative. Her effects this morning are gauzy, dreamy and luscious.

We chat. 'You've got pepper and salt in you,' says Rose. 'Do you wear stockings?'

An artist's studio has its own codes. A factory preserving a mystery. It's dangerous to interrupt the collusion between artist and model, but Rose is expecting visitors. A young friend of hers has asked if he may drop in. He's bringing a hearty cricket-playing Australian.

A tap on the door. 'Come in,' trills Rose.

I am wearing coral leather driving gloves, a freshwater pearl necklace and lipstick. I am sitting on a velvet chaise longue. The weather is hot, the studio pleasantly airy.

I am motionless and silent but appear to be emanating a force field which roots the visitors to the doorway. I think of cartoon characters spatchcocked against a wall.

'I'm afraid I don't know much about cricket,' says Rose as she carries on painting. Dab dab pink dab white.

I say that I used to live next door to Phil Edmonds. It doesn't lead anywhere.

I try to be helpful: 'Slow left arm spin bowler.'

Dab dab dab.

Of course, this is just the view from the chaise longue. I can't tell if horror and pity are somewhere in the reaction. The artist's model is patinated with the victimhood of centuries. 

The situation eases. Chitchat ensues. The model falls silent.

'Right,' says Rose, 'I've finished for the day.

'Are you sure?' I ask, flexing my right hand (pins and needles).

'Yes.'

I peel off my gloves and get dressed.

We all leave the studio. Our visitors walk towards the sea.

It's no big deal.

The Maenads would have torn them apart with bloody hands.