It certainly wasn’t that the money was good. Ten dollars an hour wouldn’t have been enough to keep me coming back if I’d really hated it. Nor did I get some exhibitionistic kick out of appearing naked in front of a roomful of strangers. But the real appeal—the reason I did keep coming back—is difficult to describe.
Towards the end of my stint as a model, I sat for a figure drawing class led by an MFA student named Dan. For their final project, Dan assigned his students a self-portrait, explaining: “It’s easier to get an accurate likeness when you’re drawing someone else. The thing about a self-portrait is that you have certain pre-conceived notions about your appearance that, a lot of the time, have nothing to do with what you actually look like.”
I think Dan’s comment on self-portraiture pretty much pinpoints the crux of my interest in modeling. I’m fascinated with the way other people see me, with what I look like from the outside. Whatever I see in myself is inevitably an imperfect likeness, skewed by my own ideas about myself, too particular to my own skin.
In the opening scene of Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop, Melanie, Carter’s adolescent heroine, stands in front of her bedroom mirror, posing as the subject of famous paintings—as one of Toulouse-Lautrec’s slatternly cabaret dancers, as a Pre-Raphaelite maiden, a Cranach Venus. “The summer she was fifteen,” Carter writes, “Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land.” I recognize that posturing, that game of self-discovery through imitation because it’s one I’ve been playing all my life.
In my own way, I’m extremely vain. I’m hard-pressed to ignore the sight of my face reflected in a window, and I sometimes I spend long minutes examining myself in the mirror from every angle. It’s not that I’m in love with my looks—far from it, in fact. Rather, what fascinates me about my reflection is that I don’t recognize myself at all. I often feel, like Melanie does, that I’ve discovered some as-yet-unknown country. “O, my America, my new found land.”
I think what appealed to me about modeling, what kept me coming back, was the hope that I might find someone capable of charting that mysterious territory in some way that I could make sense of. I think I almost believed that if I could see my perfect likeness on the page, I would learn something about myself that I didn’t already know.
But in two years on the job, I rarely saw a sketch or a painting that looked anything like me. Mostly I seemed to be a caricature of myself and sometimes I was downright unrecognizable. The iterations of myself I saw on people’s easels were, in the end, descriptions of me made by people who, half the time, didn’t even know my name. They captured the shape of me, but they never approached anything I would have called an accurate likeness.
In reality, I’m not sure I’ll ever find that perfect likeness. If modeling has convinced me of anything, it’s that the self is a kind of dark matter. Its gravitational force can be inferred, but never satisfactorily detected.
