Activity

Nudity is different than nakedness. To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others. In Arnold’s life drawing classes, I did not learn to draw a naked body; I learned to draw a nude. He taught me to seek out the body’s imperfections and irregularities to make my drawings dyna…

That night, Arnold sat me down at his typewriter because he could see that holding a pencil had prompted me to confuse handwriting with drawing. He assured me that if I could learn to draw, I could learn to write. His unshakable confidence in my intellect quieted my terrors. An age-appropriate boyf…

During his own crisis of faith, when he had let his paints go dry for a decade, he had written a novel, a Henry Miller–like romp about a middle-aged artist who sleeps with his models. An editor at Knopf had encouraged him, but after three drafts and no contract, Arnold put it away. Soon after we be…

My doubts about conceptual art had been seeded in me during my senior year. Was newness the point of art? Experimentation? Cleverness? Shock? Was it the artist’s duty to rush ahead of humanity and report back from the future? If there was an advance guard, were we at war? Who was the enemy? But my …

Later, she would remember asking the man who answered if his wife would be home, and then listening to a convoluted story about divorce and custody that struck her as more tiresome than suspicious, yet she caught a whiff of something that alarmed her, like the scent of a nearby fire. A moment later…