Liz Jones bares (almost) all for a body-confidence-boosting session with …

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Artist Skye Holland’s intimate hand-drawn boudoir portraits are a tasteful way to celebrate a life milestone, or to win back body confidence. But just how much is Liz Jones ready to reveal? 

‘That’s a great pose, stay like that, you look beautiful! Your boyfriend is going to love this,’ said artist, Skye Holland, who is standing a few feet away, at an easel, using little stubs of charcoal

So, I am in what must be my worst nightmare. I’m wearing sexy lingerie, beneath a sheer negligee, no less. I am standing up. I’m in broad daylight. 

I am posing, not just for a (female) photographer, but for an artist, who is drawing me. 

I’m having to hold my poses for between 20 and 40 minutes, which is agony.

I feel like bacteria under a microscope. 

‘That’s a great pose, stay like that, you look beautiful!’ says the artist, Skye Holland, who is standing a few feet away, at an easel, using little stubs of charcoal. ‘Your boyfriend is going to love this.’

The reason I’m being drawn, in three different poses as a sort of triptych of awkwardness, given I have a phobia about mirrors, photographs and sexy underwear (I favour Hanro sensible pants and vests), is that the number of women posing for boudoir portraits (not necessarily naked but in undies, usually on a chaise longue) has rocketed. 

I can’t think why anyone would be so vain as to want their portrait drawn or painted (I’ve only ever taken two selfies, both under duress, for work purposes), but Skye tells me differently. 

‘I’m having to hold my poses for between 20 and 40 minutes, which is agony. I feel like bacteria under a microscope,’ said Liz (pictured preparing for her portraits with a stint in the hair and make-up chair)

‘It’s transformative: women celebrating a landmark event – divorce, birthday, marriage, recovery from surgery – are also going through an emotional change, and sometimes to be drawn is quite cathartic. 

‘They might have hated their body image, but after being drawn, they leave with something different – a gift for themselves, for their husband, boyfriend…’ 

It’s a trend even men are embracing. Skye has been asked to draw a male star from Strictly Come Dancing, as a celebration of his gay marriage.

The problem I have is that while I recently commissioned a young artist to paint my late horse, I have a hard time being persuaded that an image of myself, barely clothed, is in any way desirable, or something I would want to look at. 

In the same way, I think parents with blown-up black-and-white photos of their children (calling their son ‘King’, their daughter ‘Princess’), or of each other, is a bit footballers’ wivesy. 

The children will grow up deluded about their own importance; the self adulation doesn’t make you immune from divorce. And I’m not the Queen. Why would I want, or deserve, such an honour?

But, of course, before there were cameras, it was commonplace to have your portrait painted or drawn. 

‘I have never, ever been comfortable naked or scantily clad: even after hockey at high school, I refused to enter the communal showers. My ex-husband never saw me without a T-shirt on in bed,’ said Liz

In the 18th century, people with little money could commission a silhouette – a plain black profile cut out of card that took only minutes – and it would cost as little as a shilling (thank you The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things by Paula Byrne). 

And it seems that now, in an age when every waking moment seems to be photographed and filmed on our smartphones, rendering the photograph almost meaningless, a return to a physical drawing that you can place on the piano or hide in the bathroom (which is what I plan to do with my likenesses), seems somehow special, and significant, again.

Skye, who founded her company 18 months ago, believes the process – lunch, champagne, choosing lingerie and shoes (in my case, Louboutins, which means a flash of red tongue in an otherwise monochrome study) – plus the intimacy of being drawn, which is worlds away from a photo shoot where there can be 20 people on the sidelines, is both cosy and liberating. 

She promises that the drawings will show me that I am a sexual person rather than what I believe myself to be: a cadaverous, desiccated, shy, sorry excuse for a woman whom no one, unless it’s dark and they are drunk, would want anything to do with. 

I have never, ever been comfortable naked or scantily clad: even after hockey at high school, I refused to enter the communal showers. My ex-husband never saw me without a T-shirt on in bed.

The process of being drawn is also very different to being photographed. 

There is no barrier of a camera. Skye looks at me all the time, barely glancing at her hand, which is fast moving, frantic, working seemingly by itself across the acid-free paper (the drawing, a work of fine art, is designed to last, to be handed down, become history). 

‘She (Skye) promises that the drawings will show me that I am a sexual person rather than what I believe myself to be: a cadaverous, desiccated, shy, sorry excuse for a woman,’ said Liz

It’s a very energetic process, not leisurely on Skye’s part at all, though it can take all day, depending on the type of drawing you want (I’d opted for three shorter poses, in the vain hope of an impressionistic squiggle).

And while every photographer I have ever met ignores the fact that I’m deaf and talks to me from behind the lens, so I can’t see their mouth to lip read that they’re telling me to smile, Skye looks at me and enunciates clearly, rather than shouts. 

She also kindly fails to draw my cellulite. 

She says, ‘If women are carrying a bit of extra weight I’m not going to dwell on the muffin top or the cellulite: I’m more interested in how they feel, the profile. 

‘If they’re curvy that’s wonderful as well, but I’m not going to move faithfully over an uneven surface, it’s pointless. 

‘I’m not Lucian Freud, I’m not interested in a visceral examination of the flesh, that’s not what I’m about.’

It’s this talent, and the fact that Skye grew up in a family where every single person except her was deaf, that really endears her to me.

Skye’s maternal grandfather was a deaf mute, a carpenter who also played football for Cardiff City: ‘The other team members gesticulated to let him know they were passing the ball,’ she tells me. 

‘They (women) might have hated their body image, but after being drawn, they leave with something different – a gift for themselves, for their husband, boyfriend,’ said Skye

Her maternal grandmother was also deaf, due to an accident on a coach, when a suitcase fell on her head. 

Skye’s mother, Roba, now in her 80s, is also deaf. She studied design and fashion at Glasgow School of Art, then moved to London, looking for work. She joined a deaf club, which is where she met Skye’s father, George. He was deaf, just like his parents. 

‘I was the first hearing child in two generations,’ says Skye, who was born in Redhill, Surrey, in 1960. 

‘I remember when my brother, Hamish, who is three years younger than me, was little, he had a big hearing-aid unit stuck to his front with a harness and wires. 

‘Growing up on a modern estate in Reigate, none of the other children had ever seen a deaf child before. 

‘I was expected to look after my brother, and I felt very protective of him. He and my parents shared their disability. I grew up with the feeling I didn’t completely belong to the deaf world.’

Skye learned to sign at an early age, and took responsibility for opening the door to strangers and answering the phone. 

At primary school, although she was smart, she didn’t have the verbal reasoning of other hearing children her age.

‘I like the drawing from behind the best. It is clearly you. The legs are recognisably yours. I think the artist likes them. I know I do,’ said Liz’s fiancé David

‘In a way, I was like a deaf child. I hadn’t read enough. I was very aware that people stared in the street when I was out with my parents. I was left out at school: people didn’t want to come home and play with me. 

‘My grandfather lived with us, and being a mute, using strange gestures and noises, it was embarrassing.’ 

In 1973, Skye and her family were filmed by Thames Television for an early reality TV show, Sunday and Monday in Silence, which followed the family for a week.

Her father became a surveyor, then a social worker for the deaf. 

Her mother sounds amazing, starting a dress manufacturing company with a deaf partner, employing 30 hearing workers making 2,000 dresses a week for Mary Quant, Ossie Clark and Jaeger.

‘I was the best-dressed teenager. I was always one season ahead.’

Her parents must have known their children could be born deaf. 

‘They wanted a family, just like everybody else. They were going to be fully accepting of whatever came. 

‘Imagine, though, a baby crying in the night, and you cannot hear it. They took turns to wake up every two hours.’

‘I was the first hearing child in two generations… Growing up on a modern estate in Reigate, none of the other children had ever seen a deaf child before,’ said Skye, whose parents and brother were born deaf

While her brother went on to do a doctorate at Cambridge, and has since had a cochlear implant, so can now hear, Skye became strong, independent and feisty. 

As a teenager, she rejected the idea that she would have a career helping the deaf, and decided she wanted to go to art school. 

‘I wanted my voice to count. I felt I had things to say.’ 

She shows me a book of her mother’s fashion sketches from the 50s: they are exquisite. 

‘So I grew up with this sort of thing hanging around the home. I remember practising the facial angles my mother had drawn – the angle of the head, the proportion of the eyes, ears, mouth.’

Aged 18, she left home (by now a rambling house in Surrey with paddocks and horses), found a temping job with Alfred Marks recruitment, became a PA, and took evening classes in life drawing with a woman whose daughter, Sarajane Hoare, was deaf, and would go on to become a fashion editor at Vogue. 

‘Sarajane was fiercely in the hearing world, she didn’t identify with the deaf community, but we ended up as friends. 

‘Her mum had an amazing place and would recruit ballet dancers for us to draw.’

With this portfolio, Skye was accepted by Wimbledon School of Art, and then Central Saint Martins, where she emerged four years later with a first. 

In her final show, she created casts of her face, making the mouth move to say the words, ‘Listen to the silence’. 

‘I was finally finding the voice that was unique and my own,’ she says.

‘I was like a deaf child. I hadn’t read enough. I was very aware that people stared in the street when I was out with my parents. I was left out at school,’ said Skye (pictured as a child with her mother, brother and cat Fluffy)

She then married an architect, had two children, Emmanuelle and Lucien, now 26 and 24, and in the financial downturn of the 80s, the family moved to Johannesburg for a while, where Skye began teaching art. Was she worried that her own children would be deaf? 

‘I did have some genetic counselling. I wanted to manage my expectations. My husband had no experience of deafness, so I needed to prepare him.’ 

As it turned out, neither of her children are hearing impaired (two of her brother’s three children are partially deaf).

She even took part in the TV coverage of Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994.

‘I happened to be living and working there when the new ANC constitution stated that the 11 official South African languages had to be represented, and sign language was one of them. 

‘It was estimated that 2.4 million viewers would be deaf or hearing impaired, due to appalling healthcare and terrible awareness in rural areas at the time. 

‘Never before had deaf viewers had access to news through interpreting or subtitles.’

Now based back in London, the idea for the boudoir portraits came about when her daughter visited her studio and asked her mother to draw her, naked, as a gift to her partner for his 30th birthday. 

Skye’s mother Roba starting a dress manufacturing company with a deaf partner, employing 30 hearing workers making 2,000 dresses a week for Mary Quant and Ossie Clark (pictured on a family holiday in Greece)

‘She saw this as the most intimate and precious thing she could give him. It got me thinking: this could be an amazing business.’

She says that most sitters find the process empowering. 

‘I drew a woman in her late 50s, she is prominent in her field, and she had been born with a problem with one leg. 

‘We found a pose that worked. I wanted her to love her drawing, and she did: she gave it to her husband.’

Skye stops talking, and asks me to come and look at my first drawing. 

I look melancholic, angular. I look better than I do in real life (drawings are subjective, but then so, too, are photos: you can wager Kate Moss’s gallery of photos in her home have been airbrushed) but still vulnerable, unsure: not the gurning powerhouse in my newspaper photos. 

Skye’s father George became a surveyor, then a social worker for the deaf. He was deaf, just like his parents (pictured on a family holiday in Greece)

My drawings are to be sprayed with a fixative and mounted, floating, in acrylic boxes. They should last for ever. 

I feel a bit tearful. I send photos of the pictures to my fiancé, David (who, when we first met, told me he’d studied at the RCA; when I sounded impressed, he added, ‘Rochdale College of Art’), as I’m finding it hard to effuse over my own image. It seems conceited. 

He replies, ‘I like the drawing from behind the best. It is clearly you. The legs are recognisably yours. I think the artist likes them. I know I do.’

But I’m not going to give the artworks to him: I’m going to hang them in my hallway. I’ve decided to take ownership not just of them, but of my home and my life. 

Maybe when I’m 80 I’ll look at them and wonder why I was always so ashamed of how I looked.

‘Some women cry when they see the drawings,’ says Skye. ‘They had been thinking they were not sexy enough or, “Oh God, I’m too fat!” 

‘Here they are being looked at, celebrated. They walk away with something beautiful.’