Only a few years ago, the idea of artists gathering to paint from a model would have seemed impossibly old-fashioned and hokey – and if the model was female and nude, sexist to boot. Yet for nearly three years now, a number of artists – not students putting charcoal to paper for the first time, but successful artists with established styles and audiences of their own – have flocked to weekly invitation-only sessions. ‘There’s something kind of fun about doing something so geeky, so nerdy, so traditional. To do something so anti-conceptual and anti-Modernism feels really good, as if it were going to lead to helping you express things’.”