The women in Painted Idols
Why these women, and not a life model
8 min read ▪ 30 August 2026
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A life model holds a pose for a painter. These women were never posing for me. They made an image for themselves, and the painting is what happens when one of those images is given weeks instead of seconds.
Why paint women from Instagram instead of a life model?
Because the subject of this series is not a body in a room. It is a woman who is looked at for three seconds at a time, and a hired life model cannot bring that with her. The photograph was built for three seconds of somebody’s attention. The painting takes weeks. That gap is the entire series in one sentence.
- Every choice in the source image is hers: the pose, the light, the crop, the moment.
- A life model is paid to hold still for a painter. These images were never made for a painter at all.
- It is not fan art. Fan art celebrates the image. This slows it down until it stops working the way it was built to work.
What a life model actually gives you
A life model is a person who is paid to hold a pose in a room while somebody works. It is an honest arrangement and it is the standard route into painting a figure, for a good reason: you get light you control, a pose you asked for, a body at a distance you chose, and as long as you need.
You also get one thing you did not ask for. Everything in that room is your decision. The angle is yours, the light is yours, the pose is yours. The person in front of you is doing what you requested, and what comes out is a painting of your own arrangement with somebody standing inside it.
That is not a criticism. It is simply a different subject from the one this series has.
Why that is the wrong subject for this series
These paintings are of women who are looked at for three seconds at a time. Not women who happen to have been photographed, but women whose photographs exist to be scrolled past by thousands of people a day.
That fact is the subject. It is not background information about the sitter, it is the thing the paintings are actually about, and there is no way to hire it. A life model can hold any pose you like and will still not be a person whose livelihood is her own picture.
Almost every image in this series is aimed outward. Made to be seen, and good at it. That is the premise, and the exception proves it: Kindly (On Gold) is the one that is turned in on itself, and it stands out precisely because everything around it is not.
Three seconds against several weeks
Here is the whole argument in one line. The photograph was built for three seconds of somebody’s attention. I spent weeks inside it.
An image made for a feed has a job: work instantly, then get out of the way. It is engineered for a glance. Nothing about it is designed to survive being looked at for four weeks by somebody with a brush, because nobody was ever going to do that.
So that is what I do to it. Days at a time, then a week of nothing, then more days. What happens is not that the image gets better. What happens is that it stops working the way it was built to work, and something else turns up underneath. In Riae (Blue Hair) most of the canvas is not her at all — it is what she is kneeling on, and I could not tell you why that had to take four weeks. A glance would never have found that. There was nothing there to find at that speed.
Every decision in the image was already hers
This is the part that took me longest to notice, and it is the strongest reason to work this way.
When a photograph is made by the woman in it, every decision inside the frame is hers. She chose the pose, the light, the crop, the moment, and what to leave out. By the time I see it, the picture has already been composed by somebody who knows exactly what she is doing. I did not direct any of it, and I could not have.
What is left for me is a much narrower job than it sounds: to work out what is actually in there, and then spend weeks on it. Sometimes I add something that was never in the source — the blue in Natalee (Blue Light) is mine, and there was none of it anywhere near the photograph. Sometimes I add nothing at all: Natalee (White Top) is the same pose under the opposite rule, with nothing invented. Two canvases, one photograph each, and the difference between them is the only thing I contributed.
Is this fan art?
No, and the difference is not about quality.
Fan art celebrates an image. It agrees with it. The point is recognition: you know the source, you enjoy seeing it done again, and the pleasure is in the match. That is a real thing to make and there is nothing wrong with it.
This does the opposite. It takes an image that worked instantly and slows it down until it stops working that way. What comes out often disagrees with the source. Kayleigh (Tattoos) is the canvas where I caught the joke instead of the armour, and the photograph does not show a joke — it shows a face that photographs as arrogant. The painting arrived somewhere the picture was not.
There is a longer version of that argument, about what separates a worked object from an image made to be consumed at speed, in where the line between erotic art and pornography actually falls.
The one who was in the room
One of the fourteen breaks the pattern, and it is worth saying so out loud.
Dailey Danique is one of the few women in this series I have actually stood in front of. Almost every other subject arrives as a photograph and stays one. It did not change the method — Dailey (Illustrated) was still painted from an image, days at a time over weeks — but it does mark the edge of the rule, and a rule with a visible edge is more useful than one that pretends to have none.
What this way of working costs
Working from images somebody else made has a price, and it is not the one people expect.
| What you give up | What that means at the easel |
|---|---|
| The second angle | There is one view and there will never be another. If the photograph does not show how something turns, that has to be worked out rather than looked up. |
| Asking her to move | Nothing can be adjusted. The pose is the pose, and every problem in it is a problem to solve, not to avoid. |
| Control of the light | Whatever was there is what there is. Any light that was not in the photograph is an invention, and it has to earn its place. |
| The room itself | No shared hour, no conversation, no person to check a reading against. The image is all there is. |
That last one is the real cost, and it is also the reason the paintings look the way they do. What survives months in a folder and then several weeks of work is rarely the most explicit image. It is the one that keeps being interesting, which is a different quality altogether and much harder to spot at a glance.
Who these women are and where to see all of the work is on the women in Painted Idols, and what they are written to about is in do the women know.
Questions people ask
Why paint women from Instagram instead of a life model?
Because the subject is a woman who is looked at for three seconds at a time, and a hired life model cannot bring that with her. The photograph was built for three seconds of attention and the painting takes weeks. That gap is what the series is about.
Is this fan art?
No. Fan art celebrates an image and the pleasure is in the match. This takes an image that worked instantly and slows it down until it stops working that way, and what comes out often disagrees with the source.
Did the women pose for these paintings?
No. Every photograph was published by the woman in it, and every decision inside the frame was hers: the pose, the light, the crop, the moment. Nothing was directed by the painter, and almost every subject arrives as a photograph and stays one.
Are the paintings copies of the photographs?
No. A photograph made for a few seconds of attention becomes an object worked on for weeks, at a size and in a medium the photograph never had. Colours turn up that were never in the source, and things get left out. The source is credited precisely because the painting is not the same object.
