BY SHALEECE HAAS
On a Sunday morning in August, before the students were back in session, a young woman dressed in a silky yellow robe and flip-flops paced slowly outside a classroom in UC Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall. She was there for an audition.
“I usually get stage fright after the audition’s over,” she said. “But right now I’m just trying to relax.” As an actress, Kira Wehe-Moody had been through many auditions, but none were quite like this.
The door to Room 355 opened and Wehe-Moody approached the five judges. After answering their questions about her experience and motivations, she removed her robe, climbed onto the rickety platform in the center of the classroom and, dressed only in her birthday suit, struck a pose.
Wehe-Moody, a 24-year-old drama student from Santa Cruz, was auditioning to be a member of the Bay Area Models’ Guild, the oldest and largest union of figure models in the country.
Among the judges was Bob Webb, a performing artist who started modeling “in the hippie days” of the late 1960s. Webb, who is known among artists for his friendly demeanor and his long gray beard and ponytail, has served on the audition panel many times.
According to Webb, when evaluating prospective guild members, the judges consider body type and the ability to strike interesting poses and hold them for long periods of time. But models are often selected for other, less tangible qualities.
Professional art model Lisa Drostova poses for a drawing class at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill.
“We’re interested in people with a certain level of comfort in what they’re being asked to do,” Webb said. “Some people have an element of poise or grace or good humor that you connect with as soon as they walk in the room. You think, ‘This is someone I would like to draw.’”
By day’s end, 14 women and seven men had taken their turns in front of the panel. After the audition was complete, the judges compared notes and determined that 10 of the candidates, Wehe-Moody included, possessed the qualities necessary to succeed in the guild.
For these new figure models, guild membership provides ready access to modeling jobs throughout the Bay Area at the highest hourly rates in the country (from $25 to $52 per hour, depending on driving distance) and the comfort of knowing that all clients have been pre-screened. Guild members are also endowed with a legitimacy that can be traced back to the guild’s founding more than six decades ago by Florence “Flo” Wysinger Allen.
Allen, a dynamic African-American woman from a prominent California family, began working as an artist’s model in 1933 at the age of 20. Over the next three decades she posed for many of the major figurative painters working in the Bay Area including Diego Rivera, Mark Rothko, Eleanor Dickenson and Wayne Thiebaud. In the 1960s, four separate retrospectives of work featuring depictions of Allen were held in San Francisco and Berkeley.
Newspaper articles from the 1950s and 1960s called her “a timeless beauty,” and “the Bay Area’s best-loved model.” She called herself “the original original.” According to Nona Refi, who has worked as the guild’s booking coordinator since 1998, “Flo Allen had a huge presence. She was considered the diva of the artist’s models, the queen. You would know it was Flo Allen when she walked into the room.”
In 1946, Allen founded the San Francisco Models’ Guild (later the Bay Area Models’ Guild) “to provide adequate facilities for the employment of reliable models; … to improve employer-employee relations; to elevate the standards of the profession; and, generally to advance the best interests of those who are members of the profession.”
The guild today represents 71 models, diverse in age, race, gender, body type and modeling style. Guild models work throughout the Bay Area — from San Jose to Sonoma — for high school and college art classes, private drawing groups, individual artists and animation companies. They are drawn, painted, sculpted and photographed by beginning art students and prominent artists alike.
Among the guild’s most active models is Lisa Drostova, a 37-year-old actress and former drama critic who started modeling at age 21 because, she said, “I was trying to prove that I was a liberated sort of person.” In the intervening years, she has matured as a model and considers it a very important part of her life. “I really don’t know what I would be like now if I didn’t do this work,” she said. “I think it was one of the best decisions I made about how to become a whole person.”
On a recent Wednesday evening, Drostova arrived at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, where 19 students had gathered in an airy painting studio to study figure drawing with Aida Gamez, a local artist known for her drawings of deconstructed stuffed animals. Drostova has modeled for Gamez’s classes many times before and they exchanged greetings as she pulled her long mass of curly brown hair into a ponytail and casually began to remove her street clothes, revealing a large tattoo on her left shoulder and a smaller one on her right hip.
As she stepped onto the low platform in the center of the room, Drostova exhibited no sense of shame or discomfort. But that wasn’t always the case, she admits. “The first time I modeled, I was surprised that when I took my clothes off, nothing happened,” she said. “Nobody got excited; nobody came closer to me, nobody moved away from me. They were setting up their easels, counting their pencils, doing all that busy artist stuff. They were just there and I was there and I was nude and they weren’t.”
As Gamez docked an iPod into its portable speaker, the students finished arranging their easels and prepared to draw. Drostova set her timer for 20 minutes and struck the first in a series of one-minute gesture poses. She lunged deeply, her chest thrown forward, creating a dramatic curve in her back. With her arms outstretched and her elbows bent slightly, her pose had the look of a bird in flight. Even her fingers were energized.
All eyes were on Drostova’s body. As the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black played in the background, the room vibrated with the sound of charcoal scratching on newsprint. The students glanced at Drostova, now bending backward over a low stool, then back at their drawings. Gamez called out to them at regular intervals, “Wake up. Wake up your eyes. Feel the pose.”
The timer beeped, signaling the end of the first session, and Drostova, sweating slightly, donned a simple robe and a pair of sandals. During the five-minute break, she walked around the room, looking at the students’ work.
Art model Lisa Drostova looks at drawings made of her in an art class.
Drostova confessed that it used to be difficult to look at drawings of herself. “But it’s gotten easier,” she said. “People tend to draw me a little bit the way they see themselves. Heavier set women draw me bigger; skinnier women draw me skinny. … It’s not about me. I am not the drawing and I’m not really even what the drawing is of. I am the catalyst. I am what [the artists] are responding to, to bring out something from within themselves.”
The same realization helps many models overcome the body issues that are a natural part of this job. Guild member Sabrina Kniffen, who started modeling just over a year ago, said that modeling has changed the way she sees her own body. “The first time I saw a drawing of me that made me look huge and lumpy, I freaked out,” Kniffen said. “But then I realized, that’s what [the artist] sees and that’s what he likes to paint. He likes the lumps. Once I got past the expectation of seeing my beautiful self rendered the way I wanted to see it, [looking at the drawings] has been really wonderful.”
When her break was over, Drostova returned to the stand. For the next two and a half hours, she held increasingly longer poses, taking a five-minute break every 20 minutes. When asked how she chose her poses, Drostova said that she considered the view each student would have, the way the light would strike her body, the experience level of the class and her own body’s ability to hold still for the given length of time.
Although Drostova’s body was motionless, she exuded a sense of vitality. She was, she said, exchanging energy with the artists as they worked. Models and artists alike, when pressed to define the essence of good modeling, frequently use the word energy.
Webb described the energy between model and artist this way: “It’s a symbiosis. If an artist feels rapport with a model, it takes their drawing or painting to another level. As a model, I am inspired by the artist’s work as well. I am inspired to be more alive on the stand.” Borrowing a term from the performing arts, Webb said, “Energy means getting it over the footlights.”
Good energy between models and artists can lead to decades-long relationships and artworks that find their way into galleries, museums and private collections. Nona Refi, a figure model and ballet dancer, has posed many times for renowned Bay Area figurative artist Nathan Oliveira. Refi described working with the painter/printmaker as an “ideal experience.” Their sessions have resulted in several finished works of art, including one print that has been exhibited at the De Young Museum and three limited-edition aquatint prints selling for $2,500 apiece at a gallery in San Francisco.
Refi attributed the success of their working relationship to a mutual understanding and respect. “As the artist matures, his view of the model, of the body, changes,” she said. “The artist’s model has to be as mature as the artist to make a perfect match. One has to understand the other.”
The Bay Area’s legacy as the epicenter of figurative art in the United States makes working for famous artists a real possibility for guild members. However, not all jobs require the model to be a muse. According to Refi, models are employed as “animated bowls of fruit” as often as they are called upon to inspire. “You can be the most beautiful person, you can be the most wanted model, but if you’re in a class, and they just want a body, that’s just what you have to be. And they’ll appreciate you for it.”
If students and teachers are appreciative of a model’s work, even routine modeling jobs for beginning drawing classes can be enjoyable. But occasionally the job’s drawbacks outweigh its benefits.
“It can be very demoralizing,” Refi said. “You walk into a room; it’s very dusty. The stand is dirty, the drapes are dirty, the pillows are dirty. You take your clothes off and you’re standing there trying your best. Your muscles ache or your toes are numb and, yeah, your neck hurts. And maybe the students are not really focused, not really acknowledging you enough and you wonder, ‘Why am I doing this?’”
The answer to the question “why?” is different for every model. Many are drawn to the performance aspect of the work. Some simply enjoy being looked at; others like the physical challenge. Flo Allen, in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 1967, said of her motivations, “While many models are natural exhibitionists with highly developed egos, my own reason was mainly economic — eating, that is.”
For Wehe-Moody, modeling holds the lure of celebrity. “I tell my friends that I do nude figure modeling and they go, ‘You mean naked?’ But I like it because for three hours you get to be all Zen and then you see these amazing pictures that people were drawing or painting of you. Then you go home and think, there’s art of me in a gallery somewhere.”