The Golden Line (1982)

A life drawing model who was in her ninth month of pregnancy came to model for the Western Washington University class one day. This was not her first pregnancy, and she was completely at ease with herself. What was amazing to me was that as I drew her I could see the shape of the baby moving. I was not able to convey that in the drawing, though. A few weeks later she brought her baby to class for all of us to see. Some time later I received a phone call from Blue Horse Gallery, the art gallery who was representing me at that time. She had contacted them because she was interested in buying that drawing, but the drawing was not available because I had traded it for a brightly colored drawing of a very old woman which had been drawn by one of my classmates, a middle-aged woman. The classmate wanted to frame the drawing and put it above her drawing table in her studio.

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Update (December 21, 2022):  A few years ago when I was at the check-out desk of our public library, I realized that the library clerk was closely related to my former classmate who had traded her drawing for mine.  My former classmate had since died.   I asked the library clerk if she knew of a framed drawing of a pregnant woman that had been above my classmate's drawing table.  The library clerk gave me her email address and asked if I would send her a photo of the drawing.  I did that.  She didn't recall seeing it among my classmate's belongings.  I wonder what became of it.  

When I was simplifying my life and letting go of art work that I no longer had room for, I had donated her beautiful drawing of a radiant elderly woman (whom she had drawn while visiting a family member in an assisted living setting) to the dementia care residence where my friend, Linda, lived for the last two years of her life.  The hallway walls were filled with art work, both original and mass-produced.  The dementia care management was always happy to replace mass-produced prints with original art work.  After Linda died, one of her tapestries was donated to the hallway gallery.