Female Nude – Dayna I

This was Dayna’s first time posing. I painted and drew her a few more times over the course of the years.

This was painted at a charming little antique store/hair salon/art gallery in Harvard Square. It was outrageously expensive but extremely convenient to where I was working and I felt obliged to patronize it as one of the last bastions of hippie funkiness in Harvard Square. I always wondered how the owner, a charming fellow, could afford the high Harvard Square rents. And then I found out. It turns out that in addition to haircuts, he also offered shiatsu massage. If you dropped the right hints out would come a laminated sheet of paper with a list of “additional services.” He spent a couple of years in jail for running a prostitution ring. The place is now a crepe suzette shop. I, of course, was clueless about the whole affair.

I have a history of clueless proximity to sexual crimes. Years earlier I had rented space in an old industrial building in downtown Attleborough. One day the cops were investigating a musical instrument theft (pretty standard there) and walked in on an S&M club where, as it was described in the newspaper, a client as being spanked with a wooden spoon. If I had walked out the back door of my studio and down a short hallway, I could have been spanked with a wooden spoon.