Artist's Models Links

Kathleen Rooney shares the secrets of an art model from Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object:

Male Students Sketching Nude Female Model During Life Drawing Class at Skowhegan Art School Artists Photographic Poster Print by Eliot Elisofon, 12x16

Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney

Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

"I started doing the job because it pays very well and I needed the money to pay for school, but then even after I'd settled into a 'real' job as a creative writing professor, I kept modeling on the side, I think because I'm sort of addicted to it. More abstractly, the book is an exploration about the relationship between being made into an object and objectifying others." - Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

"The first thirty seconds of nudity are always the most jarring, charged for me and for those who are looking at me, at least if it is a class or artist who has never seen me naked, never worked with me in the past. The disrobing is a gentle shock, a surprise, a kind of eyewash, and the instant is electrified, more vivid than those that preceded it and those that will come after. My nudity might seem unreal, as if it can't really be happening, as if this strange other person can't possibly be presenting herself without a stitch and letting her body be drawn. So too might my nudity feel hyper-real, as if this person is the most three-dimensional object in space, vulnerable in her nakedness, but powerful in her command of the entire room's studious and uninterrupted attention. But after these first few seconds, the flamboyance and the frisson seem to settle a bit, and the artists get down to the task at hand, which is not merely to gawk or to watch or to gaze, but to transmit from their eyes to the model, to their hands, to the page or the canvas or the clay the image they hope to render over the course of those three short hours." - Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

"It's almost like nudity becomes a kind of clothing, so think of it that way," says Kathleen Rooney, nude model and author of Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object. "You're not naked, which is vulnerable and accidental. You're nude, which is purposeful and empowered." - Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object

"This esoteric, organic meditation on life as an art object is itself a model of personal writing, perfect for those on either side of the easel." --Publishers Weekly, February 2009 "As we watch her pose, Rooney examines nude modeling from every angle: historical, sociological and biographical. She explores the territory between female beauty and intelligence, art and pornography, object and observer -- even the border between life and death -- with insight and passion." --Los Angeles Times, February 20, 2009

Kathleen Rooney

Would you take off your clothes in front of a room full of strangers if the money were right? In her bold new memoir, former artist's model Kathleen Rooney reveals all about being a muse.

Live Nude Girl Reading and Discussion with Kathleen Rooney and Krystal Meisel