Artist profile: Model Michelle Long praised for grasping works' meaning

The thought of stepping in front of a roomful of artists as a figure drawing model for the first time was nerve-wracking for Michelle Long.

She recalls nervously rehearsing for her modeling debut in front of a full-length mirror, contorting herself into various poses.

Once she got to the art studio at the Searle Building on St. Paul Street, however, her anxieties floated away.

“I started and took the first pose, then the second, then created my own on the spot and throughout the session,” she said.

Slim, dark-haired and graceful, Michelle Long’s body and face have continued to inspire many of Rochester’s painters, photographers and sculptors over the past 11 years.

She has modeled (both clothed and disrobed) for art students at Rochester Institute of Technology, Monroe Community College, the Sage Art Center at the University of Rochester, Steve Carpenter Gallery and Art Center and the Memorial Art Gallery’s Creative Workshop. She has been the subject of works by such artists as Keith Howard, Kevin Freary, Carol Douglas, Suzi Zefting-Kuhn, Sari Gaby, Alan Brewen and Dejan Pejovic.

The 35-year-old Penfield native says she has no background in art and fell into this career as a full-time artists’ model totally by accident.

After five semesters at the University of Rochester, followed by a succession of unsatisfying office jobs, a friend who did figure modeling in the 1980s handed her a flier from a group of artists who were looking for models.

“It clicked,” she said. “I needed to try this.”

Full time to Long means posing 25 hours a week. The job is taxing both physically and mentally, she says.

In addition, her nontraditional workweek affords her the ability to sing and play the tenor ukulele with The Gregory Street Vagabonds, a jazz and swing band that performs at The Little Theatre at 7 p.m. Nov. 15.

She considers her profession a rarity. “There aren’t many of us (artists’ models) in Rochester,” she says. “It’s my full-time gig — I’m not just doing it for pocket change. It’s how I buy my groceries and pay my rent.”

When posing for art students, she must strike a series of poses lasting two to three minutes each, for an exhausting two to three hours.

The object is to help students capture physical movement and gestures in their drawings. Her mind races as she creates dynamic pose after pose, thinking about the plane of her hips, the position of her limbs, and getting into various stretching and sitting positions.

Artist Steve Carpenter says Long brings a lot to the artistic equation.

“She has a natural grace. She doesn’t take a bad pose. She has a lot of innate class.”

Good models often serve as an artist’s muse, he says. “In the history of art, a good drawer will have an emotional attachment to a model. You don’t have to be ravishing, but you have to be part of the process. It creates an atmosphere that’s really important.”

Long much prefers working one-on-one, collaborating with painters and sculptors. There are ways that she adds her own emotional color to their palette, she says. “The artists have an idea of what they want and I don’t leave myself at the door. There are times when I come in and sit in a chair and the artist says to me, ‘Take one of your Michelle poses.’”

Artist Carol Douglas, a landscape and figure painter who currently lives in Maine, says Long worked for her for many years, both in her figure drawing classes and for her own body of work. “She is one of the few models I’ve ever worked with — in Rochester or New York — who strives to understand what the artist is trying to accomplish.

"By grasping the meaning, she makes the painting session more of a synthesis between two minds than a straight-up pictorial documentation. It’s a rare ability and is why she ended up being my primary model for many years.”

One of Long’s favorite collaborations was with Keith Howard, an Australian artist and head of printmaking and research at RIT who died last February. Howard was an extremely demanding professor with high expectations, she says. He had Long and another model doing three-minute poses for 3 ½ hours. “When working for him in his class I was my best professional self.”

Howard asked Long to collaborate with him on Womanizing Eve, a collection of more than 100 paintings with the Eve biblical theme that took five years to complete. Howard photographed Long in his studio and on location and then manipulated the photos to create 24-by-96-inch panoramic digital images that were transmitted to China, where master painter Xiaming Lin used the images to produce oil paintings.

“The three of us collaborated and he was the mastermind,” said Long. “The emotion and personality I brought to the project was really important to him.

She fondly recalls traipsing with Howard to isolated spots in beautiful area parks, like Watkins Glen, where he photographed her au naturel amid creeks and waterfalls and other natural settings. She even shivered in the water on a chilly October to accommodate his vision. “I was freezing — but it was great.”

Long says she sees her career lasting for many years. Older women present artists with the opportunity to paint different lines and skin textures, she says.

“Beauty is not the same in art. You look at the shapes and how shadows fall on them versus Hollywood movie beautiful people. There are ways to appreciate form and imperfections regardless of age.”

Susan Trien is a freelance writer.