I once took a life drawing class where we had a young, very pregnant model for one of the sessions. After arriving, she went into the tiny bathroom to remove her clothes and I had to smile at the incredulous whispers of my fellow artists.

"She looked..."

"Is she..."

Yes.

Very.

As she took her first pose there was a weird vibe in the room, but only because this was a new experience for all of us. We had drawn naked people. We had drawn fat, naked people. But we had never drawn this.

As the session went on any cultural taboos we may have harbored faded away and we were all totally captivated by her radiance. There was some indefinable quality about her that morning. She wasn't just a naked girl. She wasn't just a pregnant, naked girl. She was beauty. She was life. By the end of the class there was this amazing energy in the room. Everyone had these dumb grins on their faces. I've never experienced anything like it.

Later in the year, after she had had her son, she modeled for us again, and although we all remembered how it had been, and wanted so badly to relive that moment, it wasn't what it had been.

This time she was just a naked girl.