Life Drawing

'Art gotta be high up and dangerous,' the graffiti artist tells his mother. It has to be practiced diligently like playing the piano, the longtime members of a life drawing studio believe, and if your view of the model is the model's backside, you don't move for a better view. Art is a mysterious way into your model's sorrow when words fail. Art can open the rooms of your childhood. It existed before there was perspective. It can even be a dinner party. It can make a still life come alive, and it can heal a wounded spirit. Barbara de la Cuesta taught and worked as a journalist in South America. She now teaches Spanish. Her novel, The Spanish Teacher, was winner of the Gival Press Fiction Prize. About her most recent novel, Adam s Chair, Lauren Stafford, of the Manhattan Review of Books, wrote: A tapestry of literary elegance A contemporary novel for the ages.