LIVING LARGE

Wearing nothing but a black caftan, Marra Racz glides onto a low table surrounded by a room full of people--men, mostly, all in their 20s.

“How do you want to start this?” she asks, the room taut with expectation. With long poses, she is told, then make them shorter and shorter until the hour is up.

Racz brings out a digital egg timer and sets it for four minutes, takes a breath and hikes her caftan to mid-thigh. The room comes alive. “Keep the rhythm and shape moving,” barks Domenic Cretara to his Cal State Long Beach figure-drawing students as they fix their gaze first at Racz, then at their large sketch pads, then back to her thigh.

The egg timer chirps. Racz reaches for the hem of her caftan at the same moment students grab for the edges of their sketch pads. To a chorus of paper being ripped, Racz sweeps off her caftan. She is naked. More than that, she is 57 years old, 300 pounds and naked.

Racz came to the career of art modeling somewhat later in life than many of her colleagues. In her native Hungary, she worked as a registered nurse, and moved to the United States in 1979, where she studied photography. In 1993, a painter in a Los Angeles gallery overhead her asking about becoming an art model and got her a job. Now Racz is one of the most sought-after art models working in L.A. CalArts, Art Center, Otis College of Art and Design and the animation departments at Disney, DreamWorks, Hanna-Barbera and Warner Bros. all hire her to pose in various stages of undress.

Part of her appeal, she knows, is her Rubenesque body.

“I am larger than life, and that is interesting to draw,” says Racz in her beguiling Zsa Zsa accent.

“She’s a poet in the way she poses,” says Cornelius Cole, an instructor with CalArts’ character animation department. “She has a tremendous presence--posing is like theater, and she works very hard for the students. Their drawings of Marra always turn out beautifully.”

The egg timer goes off again. As Racz slowly reclines on her side and the students tear off another sheet from their sketch pads, I find myself falling under the spell of watching her. Then I realize why: I’ve never looked so long at a naked woman of whom nothing else was demanded.