David Usborne: Our Man In New York

It is a little late for me to be considering a modelling career, I know. I felt awkward enough pausing between roasted sprouts at Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday as our host fumbled with his digital camera. Please don't ask me ever to sit for a serious photographer or pose for a real artist, especially not disrobed.

Well, as if! Not much danger, surely, of anyone asking this middle-aged, turkey-stuffed piñata to do such a thing. The Zeiss lens would crack, the pencil lead would snap or the bristles would fall from the brush (like the hair from my head.) You may be impressed – or appalled – to learn, however, that I have in fact recently revealed far too much of myself for art's sake than was wise.

The result, moreover, is currently on view at a fine arts gallery in Catskill, New York, about two hours north up the Hudson river from Manhattan. The show is called Critical Mass and features pencil drawings on paper by the noted American artist Frank Faulkner.

Frank, a prodigious talent who also over the years has seen his various homes featured in any interior design magazine you care to mention, lives on the other side of the river in the town of Hudson where my partner and I have had a weekend home for a number of years. He lives across the road from us and is a good friend, and when a good friend asks for a favour, it is not always easy to resist.

Not that I didn't try. For Frank, who is best known for ethereal landscapes and large, somewhat structural, abstract works, embarked earlier this year on a different kind of project altogether. He wanted to draw the male sexual organ – the penis, framed only in its foliage, and not just one but many of them. He would pick his favourites and publish them in a book – willies from cover to cover, in all shapes and sizes.

That eyebrows would shoot up all across town was something Frank was fully prepared for. After all, he would be inviting would-be models to disappear with him behind a heavy velvet curtain at the back of his shop on Hudson's main street and to drop their Y-fronts for him for half an hour or more. Was this art, they would ask, or was Frank, who is gay, crossing the line into something more dubious?

Frank's boyfriend was always on the other side of the curtain, but only to ensure that visitors to the shop didn't stumble into the penis portrait sessions in the back by mistake (thank you, Phil!). But the deal between Frank and his models – as between any artist and any nude – was always going to be purely professional. Would anyone think anything of it if he were straight and was drawing female nudes? No.

What did intrigue him was how difficult or otherwise it would be to persuade the guys in town to participate. And would only other gays come forward, or would straights volunteer to unveil their endowments also? For myself, I admit, I dithered for ages, making all kinds of excuses. He first asked me last winter and you probably know already what I was wondering: the heating in his studio – how good was it?

Not everyone is such a coward. No cash is involved, but Frank has been inundated with men prepared to strut their normally concealed stuff and plenty of them have been straight. If anything, he tells me, the straights have actually been more enthusiastic, as if the experience was "liberating" for them.

With me, as with everyone else, Frank sat himself cross-legged in the middle of the floor, occasionally offering directions on how I was to stand and turn. In a blink, he had turned out four distinct sketches from four different angles. To date, more than a hundred men have posed and he's not done yet.

He expects to submit the collection to his agent – who is confident of publication – sometime next year. The show now on at the Terenchin Fine Art gallery is only a taster. Of the scores of drawings he has already collected, he framed only a couple of dozen for display down one wall. The omens are good. The opening party a week ago was packed. Everyone, apparently, wanted to see what the rest of us looked like.

And to the last, they were entirely respectful, aside from the few silly jokes. ("Aren't the pictures well hung?" – that sort of thing.) One friend, who, shall we say, has been around a bit, did say he felt slightly uneasy at first because the pictures looked a bit like a police line-up.

Yes, I admit, mine is up there, but I am not about to tell you which one it is and Frank, of course, has promised to keep mum. In any event, what struck me most was how largely alike most of those finely drawn willies looked.

The book might make a fine – if somewhat unusual – gift for Christmas 2008. Tentative title: Cocktales. And, who knows, if it is a hit, maybe a calendar will then follow. Just don't make me January.