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5 Nudes: John

Five life drawings of one model

Simon Goss
Counter Arts
6 min readDec 20, 2024

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John Leaning © Simon Goss ARCA 2024

I couldn’t have known, that when I opened my first ever pad of Khadi paper in July 2006 to draw John at Swansea Print Workshop, it would be 16 years before I drew on anything else. From that first drawing it was an all consuming love affair with the handmade Indian paper. I should clarify that I still made my warm up sketches on Seawhite cartridge paper (and still do) but I reserved the Khadi exclusively for the longer poses and more finished drawings.

You can read more about Khadi and its eventual fall from grace here:

But this article is about my experience of drawing John, initially for two or three years, and then again this year after a long hiatus, when he reappeared on the local life drawing scene. He is a stocky man of military bearing and, although he has a slim repertoire of poses, I have always found him to be an interesting and engaging model to draw.

1 John July 06

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Counter Arts
Counter Arts

Published in Counter Arts

The (Counter)Cultural One-Stop for Nonfiction on Medium… incorporating categories for: ‘Art’, ‘Culture’, ‘Equality’, ‘Photography’, ‘Film’, ‘Mental Health’, ‘Music’ and ‘Literature’.

Simon Goss
Simon Goss

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