In an upstairs room in Capitol Hill, a dozen people settled into a circle of folding chairs — sketch pads in one hand, cocktails in the other — and watched a model in cheetah print lingerie and bunny-eared kink mask spread across a stretch of red satin.
Then they got to work.
They came to practice life drawing, but this wasn’t a traditional class held at an arts center or university. This was Kink N’ Draw, held, for this session, at a bar called As You Are. The event is part of a proliferating practice around D.C. where people can shell out a few bucks to draw live, naked models at a bar. No commitment or experience necessary. Casual and community-oriented. No different, really, for these artists from attending a pub trivia night.
“This is a space for creativity, self-expression and appreciation of the human form in a way that is respectful, open and completely judgment-free,” announced 27-year-old showrunner and Kink N’ Draw founder Dominique Landinez.
She led the 43 attendees, situated in three groups that each faced a different model, through warmup exercises.
For two minutes, keep your pencil moving on the page.
This round, draw only with your nondominant hand.
Draw the negative space, what’s around the model.
Between each instruction, the models danced into a new pose, slinking into the splits or pushing their legs up over their heads in time with low-fi beats from a live disc jockey.
Most bar life drawing events in the area feature models in only their birthday suits, but Kink N’ Draw’s subjects usually wear a little something to cover up. It’s not the partial (or heavy) nudity that makes Landinez’s events kinky, though, she said in an interview before the event. It’s the styling.
“The props, the outfits, the expressive poses, it adds a level of storytelling and visual complexity for artists,” she said. “It also pushes people to think differently about body composition and character. But I will say that at its core, it is a figure drawing session.”
Posing nude for the first time
Since Paleolithic Homo sapiens were carving phalluses from reindeer antlers, we’ve been, as a species, obsessed with documenting the human form. Our reasons range from pornography to posterity. For comic and model Babs New, it was to find healing.
They took up modeling about a decade ago, when they were in their late 20s and battling body dysmorphia. For a comic strip they were drawing, they did a series of activities designed to force some comfort in their own skin: take swim lessons in jammers, quit hiding in the locker room. The capstone challenge was posing nude for a live drawing session, which they organized at their apartment in front of a handful of friends.
“I blushed really bad for the first 10 minutes,” they said. “But once they’ve all seen you naked, they’ve seen you naked. And it’s not really a fear anymore.”
They’ve since posed for colleges, art workshops and Zoom drawing classes. These days, they’re sometimes more comfortable naked than clothed.
“I’m not a nudist because I don’t have any aspirations to hang out with other naked people,” they said. “And I don’t apply a spirituality to it, like ‘People should be naked, we’re born that way,’ because I love wearing cute outfits. It’s just another cute outfit to me now.”
Sometimes the reserved atmosphere of traditional modeling gigs made New feel like “not a person” but something to be studied. That removal from reality might be appealing to some models, New said. But they preferred to chat and laugh with artists during sessions.
So last year, they started the Naked Friends, a modeling duo, with someone they met while working their day job at D.C. Public Library. It took some work to find bar coordinators who would buy into the idea of nude drawing nights. But now, New has hosted Naked Friends events at half a dozen locations around the city and found a permanent home at the divey Jackie Lee’s.
Finding connection and community
Kink N’ Draw was also founded by a model. Landinez, a D.C. native, was involved in kink communities (an umbrella term for nontraditional sexual spaces) when she lived in New York City. After she moved back to the District last year, she brought with her the type of event for which she use to pose.
She has since hosted drawing parties, with her troupe of about 15 models, at bars like Sinners and Saints, PubKey and Eighteenth Street Lounge, plus clubs like Transmission and Flash, always in back rooms or sectioned-off corners so as not to shock passersby. Depending on attendance, the going rate for models around D.C. is about $30 an hour plus tips, according to organizers.
Art-oriented shops, including Fantom Comics and craft store Merry Pin, have hosted live drawing events, too.
Bar owners say nude drawing nights are good for business. That’s especially critical at a dire point for the city’s restaurant and bar scene, and at a time when fewer people come out to bars during the week. Rach “Coach” Pike, who co-owns As You Are with their wife, said paid Kink N’ Draw events perform as well as free weekday programming. It helps that Landinez builds in an hour-long break where participants tend to spend some money on food and drinks. But to Pike, the events are also about attracting a different part of the community.
“You have your readers, you have your artists, you have your dance floor people, so everybody has a night to come out and get connected with people who are like-minded,” Pike said.
The appeal may seem to lie in the more risqué elements. But on that recent night, many of the attendees — most younger than 40 — were self-described hobbyist artists. The short poses, fast pace and variation make for the type of wholly concentrated session that’s hard to mimic on your own.
“I enjoy having a drink, being a little loosey-goosey and chatting with people,” said Rachel Hume, a 32-year-old project coordinator who attends Naked Friends events. “It makes the art feel a lot less precious. That’s the practice of doing figure drawing. It is a way to build up that muscle, to do it in a setting that is more relaxed and casual, to free yourself up from self-criticism.”
D.C.’s bar figure drawing scene is fairly new, but the reasons people keep coming aren’t much different from the reasons they attend, say, a karaoke night.
“The world’s a little stressful,” said Anissa Najm, a 35-year-old special education teacher. “I’ve been looking for ways to actually be out in spaces that are more community-oriented. I was looking for something I could look forward to that got me out of my phone and practicing something productive.”
She took some virtual drawing classes during the pandemic before her graduate school program swallowed up her hobby time. After she graduated, she started looking for ways to reconnect to her artistic side. Now she’s a Jackie Lee’s life drawing regular.
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