How the Raku Lady Godiva Stole the Art Show

 Enter the rustically inviting house in Loxahatchee on Collecting Canal road. Artist sketches on the front porch in pastels and pencil. Folk musicians strum and sing seated nearby. Sign in the guest book and buy raffle ticket to support endangered animal species housed two lots down in exotic zoo.

Inside, scan the room, sighting  the illustrator I came to see. http://rollinmcgrail.com/Rollin/Home.html We hug and I introduce my friend who is interested in decorating her daughter's room with her whimsically sophisticated pen and ink creations. The celebrated New Yorker artist's son greets me with a polite peck on the cheek.

We are in the art world. There's Millie McCoy, donor and arts supporter, whose husband directs the local croquet team at the National Croquet Club across town. http://www.croquetnational.com/ There's the metal sculptor who created a scandalous mermaid that was too much for Wellington's family values and was banished to the outer limits of Lake Worth's Art district. http://www.normangitzen.com/

Perusing the photography, jewelry, paper mache horses, my eye catches of glimpse of her:

Lady Godiva. 

Turning away, I'm not sure how much is showing and covered. Instead of long hair, she is several (50?) shades of grey, paint on skin to resemble the potter's material called Raku. It's like faux finish, crackled and marbled with a lustrous patina. But applied from foot to forehead, it does not pass for clothing. Someone shield the children. One father does so. Other boys ogle.

She's a 'model', expressionless and cold, avoiding eye contact with her admirers, meant to depict a live version of pottery. The kind of artists' model that would sit for you to sketch in Painting and Drawing Class (which I never did).  I practiced Beethoven. My friend majored in art and seemed much more comfortable with the concept.

 Now she walks from the back room, past the porch to the front yard. My friend says she has something covering the essentials, but I wonder why no one states the obvious, like in the fairy tale, "The Emperor Has No Clothes!"

After all I'm just a church girl trying to get out in the community and appreciate visual arts. The men, probably dragged by their wives being very visual suddenly are appreciating this art;  instant pottery admirers, aficionados lining up for photo ops with this live clay 'sculpture.'

She is stealing the show. 

The Art Show. 

All eyes on her.

Distracted, we try to enjoy the appetizers,  the baskets made of palm tree pods, the unique silver and gemstone jewelry. I engage the potter in a discussion about her techniques and materials. "Are you a potter", she asks? "No," I say, " but my sons work the wheel and they have made pots out of this beautiful mottled medium called

Raku."

The show organizer takes a picture of the potter with the live model and I heard the artist say, after adjusting poses and feeling the attention focused on something other than her skill,  What am I? Invisible? I am the potter after all, seemingly annoyed.

...And that's how the Raku Lady Godiva stole the art show!