Circles are white. thirty four.
A retrospective on being a Portrait Model for 10+ years.
I have continuously modeled in some capacity for longer than I have stuck out any other job. Being a figure model helped me act out my sexuality in a way that was socially acceptable and helped forge my identity as an adult. As an extremely creative person who loved to dance but was always too tall to fit into any normal chorus line like company roles or kick my legs with the Rockettes (the cut off height is 5'10in) the discovery that I was fit enough to model was this silver lining I had been waiting for and I took it, in all of it’s taboo and social awkwardness and loved it.
Figure Modeling forces a triumph over an otherwise awkward situation: bearing some amount of your mood, face, skin, identity for public observation. Choosing to do it is choosing to be a zoo animal. You don’t do it because it’s fun. You do it for a sort of infamy. When it gets hard or tiring you tell yourself ‘This is a hard job…I am doing it so that no one else has to do it.’ Occasionally, someone makes something that is very riveting. But 90–99 time s out of 100…it is just practice. Like filling up the gas tank of the car. Not life and death. Not a James Bond movie. However as a resident in the tri-state area there is a higher percentage of culture, art, design, architecture…a need for painting drawing and sculpting skills and Modeling became the way that I watered a spiritual plant that I didn’t know was taking root in me the way motherhood takes root in some women. First just the idea, a small flicker on the radar, and then an action, a fruition.
The fruit of Modeling is that one gets to return to art school again and again. Repeating Anatomy, color study, gesture and composition in a way that it can become very familiar, natural, and ingrained. Instead of Art school attendance being a short 4 year university experience of someones life it becomes more like breakfast, or yoga or teeth brushing.
For a long time Modeling didn’t penetrate my identity and I didn’t expect it to. After a year, …2, 3, even 4 years. I didn’t think of myself as a visual artist. I didn’t go home and try it. I didn’t own any charcoal paper. I didn’t think I could concentrate on it. There was no question. I could barely concentrate even after exercising to exhaustion so there was no way I was going to waste those precious few hours post-run on making 2 dimensional art. I couldn’t afford to. I didn’t really itch to. I did for a living. I didn’t own it.
Then life happened and changed me, the scales tipped and suddenly I had a sort of Pleasantville movie experience. I was happier. I still thought in words not pictures, but I could assign a color value to those words. I understood why people were able to make art. People weren’t listening to an inner monologue of ‘you suck’ ‘you suck’ ‘you suck’. Painting is ostensibly a fascinating way to measure health. It takes health to be able to paint, wealth in order to afford the supplies, and an ability to formulate long term goals but execute all the micro chores in the meantime.
Now that I am in a place where I can execute micro levels of organization I have the opportunity to devote that energy to painting. I will probably never be able to replicate what my eyes are presented with, because my brain is busy digesting the subtitles and these feel infinitely more important than a portrait. But I care deeply about Art forms. I want the tradition to live on.
Art has never been in a more precarious dangerous place, on the verge of being wiped out by electronics and development of eye-tracking technology and now AI in general. Screen Screen Screen.
I am nostalgic for the ambiance, the slow waves that it takes to create a good painting study. The CD player playing ‘for the Romantic’ classical Debussy, wine and cheese, real conversations. Now I find myself in a precarious place, nostalgic for the past but wanting to recreate this ambiance, equipped with only my synesthesia and 10 years of lecture attendance and no practice. If I had not remained a model for so long; I would be like an illiterate painter trying to stab at explaining Synesthesia. I feel a little bit like a long lost sister of Van Gogh…I can’t produce a similar painting…but I can justify it; all of it; the painting and the ear slicing…the beauty of a flattened plane.
Picasso is my favorite for his blue period, but he is also my favorite for his benign simplicity. He practiced the way he wanted and didn’t try to make anything complex and complicated. Suddenly, I am totally vindicated in wanting to paint the word “ZION”. For a synesthete the word image is in-separable from the idea image, in this case of a green lush park.
Here is a collection of photos and a narrative on Art or out-takes that have been so inspiring for me throughout the years. As another school year begins I find myself so nostalgic for the past but also pleased to be a part of the current term. I have so much gratitude for everyone who has made art shine for me.
I started out doing TFP shoots for Photographers:



I modeled at Studio Incamminati after I saw a flyer at Koresh Dance Studio saying they would pay $15/hour for art models. I had never done it but back in 2008 that was a decent rate and I tried it. At this time I was not interested in color or painting. I only saw words. Color did not interest me at all. What I did appreciate was the artists’ skill level. Incamminati is the best school on earth.








I reveled in Temple Tylers glass blowing studio and how all the art schools were so fundamentally different. I always wished I could swap students from one school with professors from another to help create a symbiotic culture.
After I got back from China I didn’t know what to do with my life other than pick up where I left off. In the past I had been a model, why not keep it going as long as I could?

I had worked for PAFA’s alumni club before. So I knew where they were but not what they were. When Nelson Shanks died the funeral was double booked with the PAFA Alumni sketch club saturday morning session. In an act of both remembrance and Anarchy over 30 people showed up that day and we drew, painted, and sketched to the best of our abilities confident that that’s what Nelson would have wanted.



PAFA allowed me to show off my modeling prowess and totally wore me out with it’s never ending demand for stillness; and still I could not pick up a paintbrush. I owned 1 filbert brush. I modeled for sculpture classes for the first time, including the “Long Pose” my first term there. It was grueling and thrilling and I think I took less photos of work only because I was wholly immersed and got almost de-sensitized to the culture.












I don’t have a collection of works yet, but If I am diligent I will have a display of 5–10 things representing some part of what it is like to live with subtitles on display at the Spring 2019 Staff show at PAFA. For now I am content to purchase a Screaming Pumpkin still life by Alexander Shanks at the Rittenhouse Art Show…and reflect on how much intentionality took, just to arrive at today.
