Paul Violi In the Lounge at the Physicians' Guild The standing nudes and odalisques are by Pale Otis, The Swooner; and his model was his beloved. With her before him, at times in a nightgown so sheer she looked like a lily afloat in a crystal vase, he prefected that style in which her limbs, her munificent thighs, are never outlined but fluttered and rubbed, gradations of light and dark caressed to the drowsy transparency of a pink flower beneath the wings of a honey bee, or a shoreline at high noon to a wayworn sailor's eye. He himself called it "strumming," drawing a plucked string, the sweetest, most languid string of the lute the moment before it comes to rest, to show how the sight of her erased the line between reason and rapture. And he took care to preserve these drawings with a fixative, smudge-proof and fast-drying, that did not alter his techniques or the texture of the paper; that dried in seconds and caused the least possible change to delicate tints and values. And he always tried to follow directions, holding the can at a 45 degree angle 12--14 inches above the drawing, starting at the bottom, spraying from side to side in overlapping strokes as he proceeded to the top. And this fixative contained ethanol, methanol, and ethyl acetate. And when he got some in his eyes his assistants had to flush them with water for fifteen minutes and call a noteworthy physician. And when he inhaled it his trusty assistants would comfort his beloved and call a noteworthy physician who would treat him for injury to his blood and kidneys and lungs. And when he ingested it he suffered confusion and headache, instability and paralysis. And to induce vomiting his assistants would drag him over the back of a mule, then play cards in the shade with his beloved and console her until a noteworthy physician arrived and a paler Otis was fully revived. Next |