For three long hours, I stood frozen in the middle of the room, all eyes upon me.

My body didn’t move, but my mind drifted into limbo. Time slipped into Zen mode. My knees protested creakily. The rest of my body whispered softly.

My eyes caught my every hand tremor. I really looked – I mean really looked – at my fingers and toes, every crooked, ugly joint with all those wrinkly creases for long times.

Three things occasionally popped into my brain.

Mostly, some object in the room that I stared and stared at.

Sometimes watching the different ways that the artists attacked their drawing pads. Big sweeping flourishes. Tiny precise hand movements. Different strokes for different folks.

And routine bursts of mild panic. What will my next pose be when Donna Catotti calls “time”? Every minute. Every two minutes. Every five minutes. And then longer.

I was a model at the open art studio at Haines High School.

Now you’re wondering if I was naked.

No.

Years ago, the open studio used nude models. But the studio is now in a public school and, even indoors, Alaska is a bit cold for the Full Monty. Catotti asked me to show up in tights or shorts and a muscle shirt. I borrowed a pair of black gym shorts. No one I asked in Haines owned a muscle shirt, so I settled for a black T-shirt.

The thigh-length shorts and sleeved T-shirt handicapped the four artists in the session. They couldn’t see the ripples and sags of my torso. Nor my shoulders and upper biceps.

“I hate to say it. Clothes get in the way,” Catotti said. The artists couldn’t see through my T-shirt to see how my muscles and bones mold my body.

On the other hand, I’m 60 years old and 25 pounds overweight. I’m glad no one saw my naked gut.

I’m told that artists don’t want to practice on just ripped and sexy 20-somethings. People come in all shapes, sizes and ages. Part of my role is to look like a real person.

Drawing people is harder than doing landscapes and still life, said Carol Clifton, who is more comfortable with landscapes. It doesn’t matter if an artist changes a landscape a bit; no one cares, she said. But get something wrong with a real person and everyone notices.

The open studio is a workout session for artists. “Just like an athlete, this is just calisthenics for us,” said Brian O’Riley. In basketball terms, think of practicing free throws, lay-ups and passes over and over and over so you do those things automatically during a game.

The one-minute and two-minute sessions are warm-ups. Capture my pose and draw it quickly without over-thinking it. I watch the artists, who are watching me.

Catotti and O’Riley draw with sweeping gestures while Tonya Clark and Clifton sketch in small, deliberate, precise motions. Part of that is that Catotti and O’Riley stand in front of big easels, while the other two sit at a table.

I also suspect the different gestures match their personalities.

The quick segments are to loosen up the artists – to make them more aggressive, relaxed and uninhibited for the longer poses.

“You’re thinking a little bit, but you’re trying not to. It’s hard to let yourself loose and scribble. … You’ve got to get your brain out of the picture. We want to get into the zone,” O’Riley said.

Meanwhile, my mind worked the most because I had to come up with more than a dozen new poses every one or two minutes. I used stretching exercises from long-ago aerobics classes. I mimicked a couple poses from 1940s girlie pinups. The iconic pose from the movie poster for “Platoon.” A sumo wrestler. Walking like an Egyptian. I’m-a-little-teapot-short-and-stout.

Others I just made up.

I learn how creakily weak my knees are, so I wouldn’t use them for my long poses. The class told me to twist my torso. Shift my balance to one foot. Don’t be symmetrical. All that makes my body and their sketches more interesting. I sat on a stool. I lay on my back.

At my first break, I looked at the quick sketches. None have facial features. I didn’t have any hands. Just torso and limbs. In many, I looked like the Ghostbusters’ Stay Puff Marshmallow Man on acid. Most captured my thick waist. I couldn’t hide that. This was life drawing with the purpose that the participants had to sketch what they saw.

“With the one-minute sessions, you’re trying to capture the movement,” Clark said.

In the next round, the sittings last longer. Less thinking, more Zen. In the drawings, my body is a little more detailed. My face is still a blank oval.

Then came the 20-minute sitting. With a little more than two hours experience to learn what my legs and knees could take, I chose to sit on a stool, originally facing the side before twisting my body to face forward. I made sure I picked a comfortable pose. My mind went 90 percent blank, sort of watching the artists, vaguely aware of the clock in a pleasant-feeling zone.

Time didn’t exist. Minutes passed slowly without my usual impatience when watching the clock. I went mellow.

Catotti said: “To be that still, it’s hard. … I like modeling. It’s almost an existential experience. You cannot see what they are drawing, but you can feel what they are drawing. … A lot of people who’ve modeled for us have said, ‘For us, we found it calming, kind of centering.’”

This time, the artists appeared more careful, more deliberate.

This time when I looked at everyone’s drawings, the sketches were detailed. Instead of a blank disc, I had a face with hair, glasses and beard. Most were a pretty good likeness of me, better than my driver’s license photo. My body looked relaxed and natural in a T-shirt.

But my middle was still thicker than what I would have liked.

After all, this was life drawin

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