Art-Model Miss B. Five Years Later
by Reviewer Rob
It had been a while since I’d seen Miss B. Five years had come and gone and now, this past March, the full-time art-model/dancer and sexy street wench originally from the Rust Belt was to be found in Venice Beach near the pier, living the feral life of a traveling bohemian muse.
A lot can change in five years. Back then she told me she’d never lived in a foreign non-English-speaking country. Now she had traversed the globe, working in Western Europe as well as South America and various Arab nations. She was a bit harder but just as beautiful as I remembered her. And she’d stopped chain-smoking! In person Miss B’s more petite than expected from her photos, especially when nude due to unusually photogenic limb-to-torso proportions. I’m sure she got enough work to survive while abroad as an American art-model bravely traveling alone. She’d make a great subject for sculpture, or literature for that matter.
Now she was in Los Angeles temporarily as a photographer’s model and had finished a San Fernando Valley motel shoot a day or two before, planning just one more night in Venice with her newly bought guitar before taking a bus ride back to her current home in Las Vegas the next day. When I found this out I dropped everything and drove up to L.A. from San Diego, making plans to meet and buy her a beer. I contrived as a reason for my sudden road trip that I wanted to get copies of the LA WEEKLY and The Argonaut as well as some of the other free publications currently distributed in Lalaland. This was partially true. I hadn’t perused them in a while and as an editor needed to keep current. My other reasons I kept to myself: to see her and hear about her recent two years of solo-travels through Europe, Brazil and the Middle East, as well as evaluate how she’d changed personality-wise.
I shot so many photos of her back in 2010. At the time I was playing with the idea of making a serious pay-site/member’s section on Reviewer Magazine‘s website, with a “Premium” content, and needed to shoot new material for it. Miss B flew out twice from New Orleans where she was based at the time and I hosted her at my San Diego apartment for a two week visit each. We shot a lot of nudes. Pretty much all of it I liked a lot, too. As with all really great models it’s difficult to make a boring photo of her.
When she came to me in 2010 she was 22 years-old and had an achey-breaky heart from a recent breakup but was throwing herself into her work as an art model looking for gigs. I was enamored with how she was like a young sponge, soaking up every situation and growing as an artist. She spend hours drawing and painting on my desk in her downtime, was interested in becoming a musician and would courteously turn off her phone and not text while riding as a passenger in my car so as to focus on present conversation. She was both a sweet little lady and a hardcore alt-punk rocker.
This time we sat on the night sand in Venice Beach and drank a couple of kraft beers from a liquor store by the pier that sold a defective bottle-opener to me (the soft metal bent into useless shapes while trying to open a Stone Breweries’ Arrogant Bastard bottletop) and I did some catching up with this fine little princess.
Yes she’d changed, but was still a committed artist, and still had that fiery spark of creativity and lust for adventure. But now it’s tempered with a bit more life experience and realism.
I have the content archived from those days of trial and error, but the “Member’s Section” at the Reviewer Magazine website is no more. That was an experiment that ran its course. Miss B was a part of it and, though her tumultuous character was both entertaining and challenging to deal with, I really enjoyed having her to work with.