Friendship Laid Bare

The first time I met Sylvia Sleigh, we immediately hit it off. In New York in the early 1970s, I was playing in a rock group called Island and doing some life modelling at art schools around the city. One day there was a terrible snowstorm, and I got a call asking if I could fill in at an all-day workshop where, as it turned out, Sylvia was filling in for Alice Neel as tutor.

She told me that she wanted to paint me as I was her type – whatever that meant. We lived about two blocks apart and I started modelling for her three to five times a week. Posing nude was nothing back then, whereas, for a man today, I bet it’s difficult. She talked all the time, asked lots of questions, and we found we had a lot of things in common. Sylvia used to say that she never understood why women were painted completely nude, but there was always a convenient fig leaf in front of the man. She wanted to rectify that.

It took a couple of weeks to complete Paul Rosano Reclining 1974, the second of her 25 or so paintings of me. Sylvia was masterful at capturing skin tone – and the lighting in this painting, and her choice to set it on the marble floor with the red eiderdown, and to include the unusual modern sculpture next to me, are extraordinary.

This painting was hanging on her wall forever, right above the sofa. Although I love all her paintings, I was not crazy about this one at first. Maybe it was the vulnerability of the pose. But, seeing it again today, I love it – there’s no question.

^{Paul Rosano Reclining was purchased with the support of the Estate of Sylvia Sleigh in 2015. It is included in Tate’s international collection exhibition, Nudes, LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur, Münster, Germany, 10 November 2023 – 14 April 2024.}

^{Paul Rosano is a musician living in Connecticut.}