Beyond Eden

What is it like to pose in the nude, the only one undressed, before an intensely observant audience? Thirty female and five male fine arts models tell their surprising experience. Who are these people? What can they tell us about the emotions of being examined, by and artist, a lover, or a doctor? Beyond Eden invites your curiosity.

David Forrest has uncovered universal human truths in his studies of Vietnamese child-rearing and gambling addiction. Now he does the same in a warmly lyrical but also coolly analytic study of people who uncover themselves—i.e., the men and women who pose in the nude for artists and students of figure drawing. What he finds is a mystery of what is revealed and what hidden when we remove our outer garments, the state in which we entered the world, and in which we find ourselves most vulnerable to love, hate, and everything in between.

—Martha Bayles, Boston University

Columnist, The Wall Street Journal and Boston Globe; Author of Through a Screen Darkly:

Popular Culture, Public Diplomacy and America’s Image Abroad

 

The intent of David Forrest’s watercolor sketches of the models is not to display anatomy for the sake of anatomy, but to understand their underlying character. His contemporary objective, which I share in part, is not to be a mirror but to discover the emotional strength without self-deception that we have in direct visual contact with reality. From the earliest cave art, we see this modern aim to show the emotion in the subject.

­—Alex Gamberg, Russian emigré artist and illustrator, School of Sergei Orlov

By picture and interview, David Forrest draws sensitive portraits of the fascinating and misunderstood women and men who are the subjects of Figurative artists. His watercolor sketches, created in minutes, are reminiscent of Chan painting. With an uncorrected brush, he creates empathic, convincing images of his subjects, whom he has freely encouraged to paint themselves in words.

—Nancy C. Blume, Head of Arts Education, Asia Society Museum

With an artist’s keen eye, the author enters the mysterious private spaces of the silent models of fine artists, and accords them the ultimate respect of speaking for themselves.

—Eric Fowler, Collections Manager, Society of Illustrators

Which makes the book so especially rewarding: wonderful, illuminating, and compelling stories—and wonderful, sensitive drawings by—a psychoanalyst who happens also to be a fine artist? Or—is he a fine artist who happens also to be a psychoanalyst? I leave it to the reader, having read and seen this superb and unusual book, to decide.   

—Michael C. Stone, M.D., Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University

 Author of The Anatomy of Evil and The Borderline Syndromes

This unique and often quite beautiful book of portraits and interviews ...