Website History

This website is the online development of a 1988 self-published book/pamphlet by Hugh Kilmer entitled Modeling for Life Drawing.

The work was first written in 1973, by a group of models and artists working together in Hoboken. The first version was lost by the community group that had agreed to print it. In 1977, I rewrote it from memory, and have used it since that time as a rough set of guidelines for models and their artists. At the point of original publication, the idea was to see whether these guidelines could be useful for a larger public of artists and models.

I do art work, coordinate a drawing workshop at home, and sometimes model. I started my own group because I was very uncomfortable with what I felt was an extreme lack of attention to models as people: this lack was characteristic of every group I attended, until we started our own.

The pointers in this website will often seem obvious; reflection will usually show that they are often ignored in practise. Deliberate attention to them on the part of a large enough group of models and artists will give them greater weight. If so, I think that personal and professional relations between models and artists will improve, there will be greater respect for modeling as a profession and as a performing art, and artists and models will find themselves working better together to improve both the quality of professional modeling and the quality of artistic expression inspired by that modeling.

20/01/2010