The Newest Muse

“I never refused when he wanted to take a picture,” said Eleanor Callahan, the 91-year-old widow of the photographer Harry Callahan. “I never complained, whatever I was doing. If he said: ‘Come quick, Eleanor — there’s a good light,’ I was right there." - New York Times "The Artist's Wife: A Constant Muse Who Never Said No"

Chris St. James has been gracious enough to feature me on his Universe d'Artistes blog a number of times now. However his latest post on me is a recreation of an interview we did a year ago. He's added to it using some of my own posts as well as dialog/commentary I've made on his own blog. Its truely remarkable to witness this man's imagination and I felt very honored to be worthy of his time, energy, and creativeness that produced his 21 November 08 posting of our interview. In fact, go ahead and click over to it now. I'll wait.....

Welcome back! So what did you think? The man's a genius, is he not?

In other news, I'm still working on wrapping up this year's final projects. I've got just a few more to go, but lots of edits. I was hoping to take advantage of the holiday season with some more freelance work, but I'm not sure if its going to work out as I may have liked. Four or five good projects would have been nice. So now I have goals for next year. For the time being, I stick with my endeavors to shoot more subjects other than nudes, retool my business persona, and manage my workflow and activities better. At the same time, I've desired to try to take some time to relax a bit. You know... SLEEP! I think it was last week or the week before whereby I was averaging 3 hours of sleep a day and for the longest, I hadn't even slept in my own bed. Much of my rest time came with my head down on my keyboard or my neck cracked over sideways as I slouched over in my computer chair. Crazy, I know. Well, I'm trying to make a concerted effort to do much better at prioritizing sleep IN a bed, for more than 5 hours at a time. If I can get at least 5 hours in the bed a day, that'll be sweet and I have been doing better at it. There have even been 2 days this past week where I slept 9 hours...straight!

The images you see here are of my latest muse. I've worked with Lessa, Lissa, and now Melissa. She was referred to me by Faerie and even though it took a while to actually meet, I am so glad we did. I shot her last week sometime and the experience was marvelous. I made reference to her in the last posting about being a homie from Texas. She's the one who we share the experience of both having our first jobs being at Braum's Ice Cream. Grandy's is another place we discussed missing so much. They've got some of the best fried chicken for when momma ain't making it at the time. I tell you this girl is full of energy and imagination. I am sooo glad I got to finally meet her. It was one of those things were we just hit it off right as I stepped into the door. We didn't get to go through all my normal interviews and such. In most cases, I have to insist on at least some of my basic protocols. In this case, we had a mutual trusted friend, so I knew she was cool and she also works as an art model, thereby I know she's already comfortable with being nude. Basically everything else I needed to know we covered via email and we just made it happen. The woman is a great in conversation and so darned intuitive. We'll be doing this again.

I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving. Please take it easy, relax with family and friends, and make this a safe holiday. Also enjoy these featured artist links. Both of these are models I have been in dialogs with from deviantArt. The first is ModelDonna. There are some models who simply have that "it", and Donna is definitely one of them. I made a comment that she's someone I could probably photography exclusively. I think I could make a career off this girl alone. And then there is AlexB244. I've just started a series of work on the mature woman. Alex has that grace and beauty that is evidence the art model can go on beyond the limits of time. The supermodel has a shelf life of 5 to 7 years. Not many are able to make it beyond 10. The art model is different. She can go on as long as she desires. I wish it were a truism that the art model is the ideal woman by whom young girls measured themselves against. And when you look at Alex, you know for sure that your real beauty is to the core. Photoshop is only a layer deep.