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More nudity in our private lives—chores, sleeping, gardening, etc.—will nudge attitudes toward the point when public nudity will be accepted. I think there's been positive feedback between naturism and life drawing. My introduction in college in the mid 1970s had nude female models, and men in jockstraps. When I began drawing again (and posing), a dozen years later, the jockstraps were gone, both in private studios and at university classes. I have been active in Minneapolis' life drawing scene ever since. When I've told non-artists and non-nudists about drawing from the nude, they have seemed to be pleased at the idea. The two groups I draw with take nudity pretty nearly for granted. It seems that a century or so of American nudism must have eased our casual use of nude models and our acceptance by non-participating acquaintances. I have heard about groups who have rotated modeling duties, but there don't seem to be any here currently. Many more women model than men (my friend who organizes one of the groups says the ratio is about 12:1), and while my own ambitions are to study and portray the human nude, male and female, the artists who have expressed opinions to me, both male and female, seem to prefer women. I have drawn three men who have admitted that they came to modeling because they enjoyed being naked. One was an excellent model, one was adequate, and one could not keep still to save his life. I would not take exception to someone's using my drawing him to experiment with being publicly nude (my own naturism says everything needs to be studied and documented, like the guy who posed in chaps and cowboy hat), but I would ask nudist models to take to heart your counsel that modeling "can be tiring work and takes experience to be done well."

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