ARTIST AND MODEL

"ARTIST AND MODEL"

Somewhere Beyond Adam & Eve...

I nearly killed the Dracaena Marginata, one of the plants that live with me in a room that was vacated by everyone else years ago. I was only reaching over to adjust one of Heather's nipples, as she lay naked for me, posing on the bed for a drawing I was making, as I sat there beneath her body on a tiny chair my daughter left for me. Heather's touch proved so electric that it knocked me back onto the table where a dozen candles burned, in fact, upsetting them onto the plant, which dripped red with wax from its leaves, like my cock dripping hot and red as I fell backwards onto the floor while she laughed at me. I was only trying to maintain my 60 years as an artist, I suppose, perched precariously beneath the wilting leaves of Adam and Eve's deceptive tree called knowledge.

Long ago it was a natural act for me to get up from lovemaking to render a sketch of the one I loved... or often carry a crayon to bed to snatch those forbidden glimpses of love and render them as artworks between heart beats before they became forever lost and irrecoverable during the next cigarette break. But now it has become a challenge and a compromise, as I create the bizarre but necessary relationship, pitting my escalating celibacy against Heather's handful of days without Satan on her back. She loves to fuck - or so she tells me - as I struggle to focus on pencil and paper rather than her voluptuous pubescence staring me in the face. The drawing always suffers from such a sacrifice - I too suffer from such a sacrifice.

Oh how naive are the young, wet females from the suburbs who encounter me - or more accurately, encounter the myth of me. And how equally naive am I in their presence, although they know it not. Rather, they swear that I am the height of perversion, as they stand in awe of the demented sex life they imagine me to exercise. The sweet little things never suspect, even when I tell them, that I am without intimacy for five years and counting (or so I was at the time of my encounter with Heather, summer 2000).

So you can bet that I am lusting after this young and pretty flesh that sits just a few inches from my fingers while they work on the paper. She says it's been three months without sex for her, that she too is celibate. I try to find out if she masturbates, but she's too nervous to pull the strings that will cause the magic stalagmites to drip inside the cavern that grows within her, as now evidenced by the wet vulva opening its wet lips for a breath of fresh air.

I picture her ample juices flowing like streams, forming rivers that gush past her half opened lips and explode onto me, or at least spurt their warm liquid hues onto the unused pages of my sketch book, like the hot wax that now spreads like lava from the spurting candles. Ah... some girls got it going on!

But here the two of us are trying like hell to celebrate our celibacy, to indulge in an art that is really a test of faith. I tell her, "Me. I'd just as soon throw down this pencil and suck your clit until it rains down its potion upon our dry land." Is she amused? Or amazed? That I said that. What does she expect... for me to honor her celibacy by ignoring the challenge it presents? We both know that if I weren't old enough to be her grandfather she would hop on me in a flash, in the flesh, to live out the fantasy she brought here with her.

Ah, the artist's life! In Art School they want the model to sit perfectly still and keep quiet, so the artists can concentrate. What a backward notion... that someone could be distracted by the very substance they are anticipating as awareness! Try and tell that non-sense to Gauguin, or Andy Warhol - or even to me, fumbling for a fresh pencil and the rhythm to guide it on to its sacred duty. To contemplate her naked booty is my sacred duty. My cock throbs, her cunt resonates. We are making out. We are making out of art the longing for one another. But we are making art out of the act of ignoring our feelings, both of lust and longing, the sex and noise and taste of it all, to sit quietly in a room full of candle light and incense, drawing pictures from within us. And from above, I hear God crying to me, "I gave you this talent and I expect you to use it!" And I guess HE means business, and so I guess I don't get any pussy again today. But hopefully the drawing will ache within someone's soul enough to turn him or her on and into buying it. And the Artist's Life goes on...

BURKHART STUDIOS

2845 N. HALSTED STREET CHICAGO ILLINOIS 60657 773 348-8536