{"id":150,"date":"2004-07-15T05:59:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-15T11:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/?p=150"},"modified":"2004-07-15T05:59:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-15T11:59:00","slug":"the-spaza-gallery-troyeville-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/the-spaza-gallery-troyeville-3\/","title":{"rendered":"The Spaza Gallery, Troyeville"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 class=\"date-header\">Thursday, July 15, 2004<\/h2>\n<p><i>Service: * * *<br \/>\n<br \/>    Food: * * * *<br \/>\n<br \/>    Ambience: * * *<br \/>\n<br \/>    Babe Count: * * *<\/i><\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mysite.mweb.co.za\/residents\/rb000004\/Maria_1.jpg?resize=200%2C266\" alt=\"This is the first of my three palmtop sketches of Maria. We settled her into a nice comfortable pose, which she had to hold for thirty-five minutes, and then resume for a second session of the same length.\" align=\"right\" border=\"0\" height=\"266\" hspace=\"6\" vspace=\"6\" width=\"200\" \/>Lionel has sourced a really interesting model for the portrait circle tonight. That&#8217;s why Linda from Exclusive Books isn&#8217;t here tonight. She&#8217;ll be our model next week.<\/p>\n<p>Maria has a fairly heavy jawline, quite jowly, and with really interesting angles to her cheeks. Long hair, with silver showing at the roots.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe it&#8217;s because I&#8217;m thinking about things like Mastery &#038; Submission, but I&#8217;m noticing that Maria is being extremely assertive and dominant over Drew&#8217;s cat. &#8220;Come here, cat! I&#8217;m talking to you!&#8221; she says. &#8220;Come here and let me love you to death!!!! Come here or I&#8217;ll punish you!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Hmmm.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe there are many many many more people in the world into this than one thinks. I&#8217;m debating whether or not to ask Maria if she&#8217;s into it, but I decide not to. From the way she&#8217;s treating the cat, I must assume that she gets her kicks from taking the Mastery position. And right now, I&#8217;d prefer to be the master of my own destiny, thank you very much.<\/p>\n<p>Maria is here because of a childhood trauma. Some artist was commissioned by her parents to do portraits of her and her two siblings way back when she was a little girl. &#8220;He painted my brother and sister,&#8221; she tells us, &#8220;and brought the works round to my parents. They hated the portraits, so they paid him, and told him to forget about the third one &#8212; mine!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I say, &#8220;So did       those portraits look like them?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She thinks for a bit. &#8220;No.       They were actually horrible.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;So you&#8217;ve been wanting to have your portrait drawn all this time, cos you were jealous of them having their&#8217;s done??&#8221; I ask.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Well, yes,&#8221; she says.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Hmmm,&#8221;       I say. &#8220;How can you be sure we&#8217;ll do a better job than he did?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;My brother still has his,&#8221; she says. &#8220;And I&#8217;ll just buy some frames and put all of mine up. Even if they don&#8217;t look like me.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We put her through the short poses, the three-minute       sketches from which she gets to choose one work from each artist. <\/p>\n<p>It seems to have fallen on me to be the timekeeper in this group. Maybe it&#8217;s cos I&#8217;m a natural leader? (I&#8217;m NOT overselling myself here, okay, Karen?) So I pose Maria, and keep my eye on my watch. I&#8217;m doing ink sketches on paper for these warmups. I&#8217;ll be working on my palmtop later, during the two long poses.<\/p>\n<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mysite.mweb.co.za\/residents\/rb000004\/Maria_3.jpg?resize=200%2C266\" alt=\"The third of my portraits of Maria. Decided on a closeup, just cos I wanted to see the angles of her jaw better.\" align=\"left\" border=\"0\" height=\"266\" hspace=\"6\" vspace=\"6\" width=\"200\" \/>In the last of the three-minuters, I decided to practice a bit of the Mastery &amp; Submission stuff I&#8217;ve been thinking about. See, I&#8217;ve figured that with Karen, I can instruct her to adopt some sexually compromising poses, and then I&#8217;ll draw her, and have sex with her, and draw her some more. Sounds ideal. And she won&#8217;t really be able to object too much, cos I&#8217;m the boss, see? So with Maria, I ask her to lean her head back a bit, ostensibly to get better lighting on her eyes. Actually, it&#8217;s cos I know that her neck muscles are very quickly going to go nuts, and she&#8217;ll be uncomfortable quite quickly. However, this is of her own making. She told us earlier that she&#8217;s prepped herself for some serious pain tonight. So I thought I&#8217;d call her bluff.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of the pose, I say, &#8220;Are you       still comfortable?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She says, through gritted teeth, &#8220;How much       longer? My neck&#8217;s a bit sore.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Just a minute more,&#8221; I       say. <\/p>\n<p>Then we have soup, made by Dean &amp; Duncan. It&#8217;s superb. Souperb, actually. These are the dudes who chef for the gallery every Sunday. The chef&#8217;s plate lunch they serve is often splendid, according to reports from my buddies.<\/p>\n<p>Then we get Maria into a nice and comfortable       pose, with a pillow behind her neck. See&#8230; I&#8217;m a kind and merciful lord.<\/p>\n<p>At the end of the sessions, she looks at the various depictions of her, and chooses her bounty. Drew Lindsay has done the best work of all of us. With Lionel&#8217;s acrylic coming a close second, and my three palmtop drawings getting a lot of favourable attention.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to have to go home and       think about bondage. Maybe do some research on the internet.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m       taking this cat home with me,&#8221; Maria says to Drew.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s not       my cat,&#8221; says Drew. &#8220;First time I&#8217;ve ever seen it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Excellent,&#8221;       says Maria, rubbing her neck. &#8220;Come here cat!!!&#8221;       <\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">Roy Blumenthal is a writer, director, artist, and <a href=\"http:\/\/snipurl.com\/visualfacilitator\">visual facilitator<\/a>. Hire him to make pictures of your meetings or workshops.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday, July 15, 2004 Service: * * * Food: * * * * Ambience: * * * Babe Count: * * * Lionel has sourced a really interesting model for the portrait circle tonight. That&#8217;s why Linda from Exclusive Books &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/the-spaza-gallery-troyeville-3\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Spaza Gallery, Troyeville<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p521FP-2q","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/royblumenthal.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}