Who looks at whom, and under what conditions. That is the real question behind every life drawing. Art history answered it in favor of the male gaze for centuries. Berlin answers differently.
On August 8, Drink and Draw at Funkhaus puts a model from Berlin's f3tish scene on the platform, in, as the studio's own announcement puts it, “striking outfits.” Felix Scheinberger leads the workshop. What happens that day is more than drawing. It's a small shift in the regime of the image.
Life drawing has an image problem. Hundreds of years of academic tradition, from Michelangelo to Schiele, sit on your shoulder before the first line is drawn. You already know “how it's supposed to look.” That's exactly why it rarely works.
Scheinberger proposes another route. He moves the academy aside and invites someone into the studio who doesn't come from the classical modeling tradition, but from a Berlin subculture with its own visual language. Latex, harness, leather. These codes aren't provocation. They are a vocabulary that wants to be learned.
Scheinberger is an illustrator, author of 100 Ways to Paint a Bird and Children of the Night, and Professor of Illustration at FH Münster. Anyone who knows his books knows: he takes drawing seriously without making it sacred. That attitude carries the workshop.
The day moves between demos, free work, and personal feedback. Bring your own materials, or use what the studio provides. The workshop is in German, open to all levels, from beginner to professional.
Drink and Draw itself is no ordinary drawing school. The Funkhaus studio has worked for years with burlesque performers, pole artists, drag models, and sex workers. F3tish Sketching is the logical continuation of that line, not the exception to it.
Why we at BERLINABLE are going
We've already had a longer conversation with Felix Scheinberger, about drawing as a form of attention, about eroticism in the line, and about what happens when a body is not idealized but actually looked at. Read the interview at BERLINABLE.
That's exactly the point. Life drawing is never just practice. It's a negotiation about who looks, who is seen, and on whose terms. When the model comes from the fetish scene and brings their own aesthetic with them, the classical power structure of life drawing tips over. The model is no longer a silent object. They are a co-author of the image.
This is the kind of cultural translation work the Berlin Kink Calendar exists for.
Before you mark your calendar: always double-check dates, location, and ticket info directly with the organizers.
Even the best promises come with fine print.