Most students in The Netherlands have some job or another, whether that be dishwasher, shelf-stocker, laundry-doer or ice cream scooper. How else are they supposed to afford beer? I too have a profession, though in a somewhat fancier field: I'm a model at an artist's collective!
I got the opportunity about this time last year via WhatsApp, from a former student. And boy was I lucky to seize it. Most international students can only find work at big-box stores or in hotels- my roommate works at Action, a sort of Dutch Walmart, and makes €8.50 per hour.
The studio is in Vlissingen, so naturally I commute by bike. It's an unassuming single-story brick building, between a primary school and a shopping complex in the suburbs. The atmosphere is my favorite part- you can tell that people have been doing art here for a very, very long time. There's lots of old work on the walls, dried paint on the floors, and the smell of art-supplies.
For a long time my schedule didn't agree, but starting in May last year I began what has been a steady job for a busy student. It's definitely part-time: there are five three-hour sessions, once a week for five weeks. I make €15 per hour, coffee breaks and snacks included. But the ideal part is, it's all under the table: no contract or taxes!
It's also a great opportunity to practice Dutch. All the artists are in the 55-70 age group, and very interested in what an American is doing with Water Management in their corner of Zeeland. On account of this, my vocabulary has a disproportionate amount of words for body-parts: kaakbeen, oogkas, voorhoofd, adamsappel, neusgat, to name a few.
The focus is on facial-geometry and lighting. I think the eye and nose in the lower left is really good!
The "sitting perfectly still" part isn't so bad either. I do 20-minutes, followed by a 5-minute break, in four increments, from 9:00 to noon. With a generous 30 minutes for coffee too. I find it rather meditative, and I have giant plate-glass windows to look out of. My language skills are good enough to understand that, when the phrase "het koffiemachine is kapot!" is uttered, there will only be tea during the break.
Everything is orchestrated by Peter-Paul, an artist from Belgium who reminds me very much of a particular art professor I had when I studied at Gustavus. For me, the hardest part of all this is not reacting when he points to and explains the particular curvature of my left cheekbone. "You can see here, from this angle there is..." and so on.
Naturally, some of the painters are better than others. (if you can distill their work to a sense of "good" and "bad"- I find that too critical, and I'm a student, not a connoisseur) It's said that every artist paints a version of themself into an artwork, and I'll let you readers be the judges of that:
For the spring session, I was even gifted my own portrait by one Lucia Boerna, which now hangs on the wall above my bed. I've covered it with thick brown paper, since at the time it was made I was reading The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. I want to avoid that kind of situation!
I agree, you look quite grim...maybe the coffee pot was kapot?
ReplyDelete