When I painted strippers, I didn’t do it the same way that Reginald Marsh did. Maybe that’s what attracted me to it in the first place. I think that I have a different sense about it and a different way of rendering it. I think those bodies are terrific, but that’s dangerous territory. That’s forbidden sex. And I’m saying, What makes it forbidden? I’ll give you an example. I had a model who had been a life model, worked at the League and so on. She had no problem standing before total strangers with nothing on, and she had worked for me in my class. I hadn’t used her for nude poses. I said to her, Listen, I’m interested in doing a series of things on strippers and I need a model. You’d be terrific. I didn’t tell her why she was terrific because the reason was she looked very depressed. I thought that was part of what I wanted to get at in the painting. I didn’t do it in a studio. I went to her room, a cubicle really, in a shared apartment. It was close quarters. I would tell you that it did elicit some other random thoughts in me as I was drawing. I had her put on long black stockings and a G-string. She was topless and had on high heels. But, you know, as the art takes over, pretty soon you are really doing something that is creatively using those feelings. I did a half a dozen drawings. I was really pleased because she perfectly fit the concept I was working towards. We finished, and I said, Terrific, I’m going to set up a schedule for you to pose again because I want to paint you. She said, I can’t do this anymore. I said, Why not? You got a bad schedule or something? She said, No, I just can’t do it anymore. I said, You have to explain it to me because we had a good work session here. She said, What if my mother sees the paintings? So, flash of insight. Suddenly, she became the stripper and that troubled her. See, when she had no clothes on, she was an art model. When she posed as a stripper, she actually felt like one and that was disreputable. So, I knew I was on to the whole disparity between myth and reality, between painting under the cover of art as opposed to saying, OK, here I’m painting about sex. I’m painting about sex workers. But it is also about the fact that they have beautiful bodies, and they affect you in the same way that the human body does in every other circumstance. ...The paintings need to exploit the duality of the sexual experience. Eroticism is OK when you paint a goddess or nymphs, unreal creatures, but not OK when it’s sex in a disapproved of real-life form as in the strip club. It doesn’t work as well if the nude is not erotic. (http://www.asllinea.org/burton-silverman-in-search-of-the-humane-art-journaling/)