5: Pink Girls Painted Pink
There were two living models, though I grace this quatrain, Pink Girls Painted Pink, with only one, because of self-imposed deadline constraints. Each was painted by Artist Alexa Meade, who is as gifted as Mary Cassatt and who applies her colors with a softer and happier touch than did Ms. Cassatt. If I got it right, the name of the model I depict is Alexa Split. (Contemporary and Cool, Cool Name.)
Artist Alexa Meade apparently got it in her brain that she would paint living models as if she were painting portraits like Henri Matisse or Amedeo Modigliani, thus creating portraiture in a way I have never seen before. (Spiffy and Funky and Perhaps Immortal.)
The lighting was both artificial and natural, and the audience was invited to take photographs, thusly “reinterpreting the work,” as the National Portrait Gallery brochure on the event states. (National Portrait Gallery Washington D.C. USA, that would be.)
I worked hard—diligently, effectively, magnanimously, bobbing in, bobbing out, elbowing my way for optimum angles way up front— with my trusty Samsung $326.47 TL34HD point-and-shoot digital, and found Model Alexa Split’s body more intriguing than her beautiful face. I judged that Model Alexa Split and Artist Alexa Meade were 38 years younger than me, so I didn’t ask them out for Skip and Go Nakeds, nor did I hit on them with lines about how 27 artists in Paris in the late 1800s lived in one apartment (it must have been a large thing) with one—I swear, one—toilet bowl. I am sure such esoteric fact flinging by a mature aesthete such as me would have impressed them both, but I didn’t do what I venture a lot of boy models photographing $1 million Vogue models do. I kept the whole event free from dirty thoughts, carnal mortal sin and scurrilous resultant gossip.
I have no conclusions to reach about this event other than to say that Artist Alexa Meade’s inventive idea of the whole thing is ingenious, and I wish that I (my humble, broke self) had come up with it. I also believe, fervently in my sensitive heart, that Vogue Magazine should hire me to depict its models, and Vogue should then splash my photographs all over all the grocery stores of the world, and pay me lots of money too, don’t you? All my work with gorgeous skinny, if not decimated, models who must spend half their days hungry for lunch would then be guaranteed lust-free and G-Rated, in the best of American traditions.
Modern Art and Poetry 