The model, by the way, is Kira, and she's one of these people who can stand rock-still for a half hour as if she had been hit by a blast from one of those stun-phaser-gun things that actors used to carry around in sci-fi movies, the kind with rings around the barrel that you could get for yourself with 50 Wheaties boxtops when I was a kid, but I was always disappointed that they were just toy replicas and not the real things. My ultimate goal was to secure a real one, so that instead of immobilizing mayhem-inclined aliens like those fools in the movies, I would aim it at the nearest woman and then take her clothes off. First ascertaining, of course, that the nearest woman wasn't my Mom. Now that I'm a artist, I have an excuse for seeing naked women on a regular basis, but the odd thing is that when a naked person is in modelspace, he or she is transformed into a different being, not entirely an object, but something like that--a cloak of neutrality rests on their shoulders. One thing that I've never really captured in my figure drawing is the sense of a real person without any clothes on; it always comes out as a stylized art object. That's what I love about the work of Lucian Freud or some of Alice Neel's drawings--the visceral shock of confronting a naked person.In fact, I think there should be more naked people, men and women, scattered through real life, just to give you an occasional jolt. We would pay them, of course. It would be better than mimes.