Posing Naked

As a writer I often get my friends to pose naked for me.

Not in the way that they would pose naked for me if I were an artist (or would they?), shedding their fabrics and exposing their flesh, breasts flopping, dicks dangling, while I try to cement this inspiration onto canvas.

No, I have neither the artistic ability nor the desire to see my friends au natural. A couple of my female friends I have seen in naked state it is true, a long while ago, brief flings early on in our friendship, but painting them was the last thing on my mind. Tim also I’ve seen naked, several times, he has a habit of taking his clothes of and wandering around in the nude, but I‘ve never asked him to, let alone shown him any encouragement by painting him.

I do nonetheless use my friends as life studies all the time. Fragments of their lives I covertly borrow and stitch into a story, a scene with two people meeting while walking their dogs, or a friend‘s brief encounter with a famous actress. The stories I tell are enriched by the reality of my friends’ lives, words or phrases I’ve heard them use, ideas they’ve expressed, jokes they’ve made, the tragedies and comedies they‘ve been through. The emotions they share with me I reproduce in their full naked glory, on the pages of my imagination.

I stitch these fragments franensteinly together with my words, to create new life, just as I can add the letters ‘ly’ on to the end of Frankenstein to create a new word, hot off the imagination.

Sometimes an entire story comes from something that happened to a friend. Like the time Dave was cloned and forced to compete for survival with a superior version of himself, that’s the sort of thing you just can’t make up.

I don’t tell them of course, sometimes I’m not even aware myself, but it’s not that rare for one of my friends to spot that one of the characters in a story is based on a mutual acquaintance. Sometimes they spot themselves, which is always awkward, it makes them less likely to pose naked for me in the future.

Most of my friends now start any conversations about their personal life with the proviso that it isn’t to be turned into a story, which is why you’ll never get to read about the time my friend Tim had to hide naked in a grand piano. Actually, let’s call him Tom, it’s indiscreet to use real names.