Mike Dommermuth
Carlos Durazo
Andrew Kovner
Maria Leon
Yi-li Chin Ward
and others

For over 20 years a varying but always cohesive group of artists has met at art studios (and even a backyard) in Los Angeles to draw Art models from life. In cities and towns elsewhere in the world, much the same phenomenon occurs.

What is this ceremony, and why does it endure?

We suspect that because in its essence, it exposes a shared interior journey within us all. It's all there to see: the model's attitude, the artists' attitude. The model's preoccupations, the artists' world view. A fish net of line and color cast over the body of another human: molding to them like their skin, or amorphous. Electric, agitated; calm, considered, hasty, colored, hallucinatory, stark, monotone; graded, fuzzy, wispy, cohering, disintegrating, focused, discarded, erased, smudged… tiny, huge, stained, lugubrious, exact, unsure…

It's an interior journey and an implied agreement between two or more people that defines something about the human spirit. And here's the deepest mystery – Is the result the model?, the artist?, something somewhere between the two? Or something else: something beyond the participants entirely.

One true thing we can state: what emerges is an "artifact". Something that can be touched and carried away. But not just a simple fact, rather an "artifact"…