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The Naked Muse

The Naked Muse

Kelley Swain

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Throughout her twenties, Kelley Swain worked as an artists’ model. The Naked Muse is her elegant, fascinating memoir of this time, meditating on art, travel, and how we accept, inhabit, and understand our own bodies. She describes her first experience disrobing for a class, modelling for international artists over six years, an intensive month being painted in Bruges, and posing as saints for a Sicilian chapel frieze.

Swain reveals how it really feels physically, intellectually, and emotionally – in the moment when “it’s my matter that matters, not ... what I consider to be ‘me’.” Both a flirtation with submissiveness and a wielding of power, Swain examines the model’s role in art’s alchemy, and tells the forgotten stories of women whose faces still bewitch us from gallery walls.

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Imprint: Valley Press

Published: May 2016

ISBN: 9781908853677

Catalogue no: VP0084

Page count: 166

Trim size: 198 x 129 mm

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Praise for The Naked Muse:

“A virtuoso concoction of life writing, meditations on painters and painting, body morphology, travelogue and researched investigation into the 'gaze'. Full of light and colour, Swain’s prose flows beautifully ... fans of Rebecca Solnit or Marina Warner will love this.”
— Richard Skinner, author of The Mirror

“An insightful, lyrical memoir which sheds light on the role of nude models ... illuminating both their immortality and invisibility.”
Fani Papageorgiou, TLS

About the author

Kelley Swain is a writer and academic. She has been an art and culture critic for The Lancet medical journal since 2014, and is the author of numerous books, including poetry and fiction. She is currently undertaking a funded PhD in Art & Health at the University of Tasmania.