Kay Miller, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Originally published Mar 9, 2002; Used with permission
Artist Stuart Loughridge studied model Wendy Gherity.
Photo by Kyndell Harkness, Star Tribune
Wendy Gherity recognized the man in the white hat before she removed her sarong, before she settled onto a high stool in a nude pose that she would hold most of the night.
The man was smallish, with thin arms. But what she remembered was the cruelty.
In seven years that she had worked as an artist model, there was just one time that an artist was intentionally rude -- deriding Gherity's poses and her body. It happened a year earlier at the Atelier, a Minneapolis school that specializes in classic art techniques.
When she arrived, the man said that the class expected a standing pose. Those positions — especially when the body twists — are among the hardest on the human body. Blood pools in the feet and the head can go light. Gherity had seen models pass out without knowing it was coming. She wouldn't do that to herself — not for $10 an hour. She offered a lovely seated pose instead.
She remembers the man ridiculing her while the students painted — as if she weren't present. Finally, she had enough and walked out, but not before telling him why.
"Oh, so we're all rude," she remembers him saying.
"No, you in particular. You are rude."
The incident stuck in her psyche because most artists make Gherity feel beautiful, as if she were part of a sacred covenant in the creation of art.
Now, a year later in the Minneapolis Drawing Workshop artist cooperative where Gherity felt so comfortable in the past, the man in the white hat sat facing her.
The sounds of traffic and tires sloshing through puddles outside envelop a dozen artists in Harold (Stoney) Stone's third-floor studio in Minneapolis' Warehouse District. Shoes shuffle on scuffed hardwood floors. Chalk passes grudgingly over rough paper. Stone sighs, coaxing his charcoal to capture the S-curve in Gherity's back.
Stone owns the large Minneapolis studio in which members of the Minneapolis Drawing Workshop, one of several dozen local artists cooperatives, meet weekly. Gherity, 33, is smallish and has soft, womanly curves. After dancing for 10 years, she knows her body and spends the first five minutes rearranging herself before choosing a pose whose angles will catch the light.
Using her left hip as a center of gravity, Gherity extends her right leg, wedging it against the modeling platform. She balances her left foot on the top rung of the stool and braces her left arm against its seat. Finally she turns her head, gazing down demurely.
"Oh, that looks wonderful!" says painter Lisa Colwell.