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Disappearing Nudes
by Kevin Rolly
When I was young, I worked as a life-drawing model on a college campus. Winter mornings I would climb onto a pedestal in a cinderblock basement studio and hold a pose for 15 minutes to an hour. There was a space heater that pulsed and clicked, while outside ice would shift and crack and fall onto the snow. Besides that there was no sound except for the scratching of students’ charcoal on vellum. I used to sit there and imagine what was being created on the other side of the easels. It was not the students’ accuracy that I was worried about, but rather whether or not their drawings would replace the memory of my image.
Looking at these gauzy female nudes — hybrids of oil paint and photography — by Kevin Rolly, I’m taken back to the art studio of my youth and that inexorable preoccupation. But unlike the images created in my likeness, Rolly’ s women reveal what a palimpsest memory is — already fading. Were we to look at them again in a few months they would almost not be there.
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