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A Woman’s Journey

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November 18th, 2007 | Visual, Model, Kenosha

by Tammy Peacy

chelle.jpg

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud became more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

- Anais Nin

The intent of this interview was for me to learn something new about a woman I know and admire. I also learned a few things about myself.
I attended an open draw in which Chelle Krome was the model. I wasn’t there as an artist, but as an observer, a learner. I thought I would be uncomfortable seeing an acquaintance sans clothing. I sat at the table, real artists on either side of me, and held my breath. As it turned out I was more shocked to see her without her glasses than I was to see her nude. And I actually did draw her (or something that could maybe be her if you’re squinting).
Her body was as she describes: the body of the mother of four children, the body that has nourished and nurtured; the body of a woman.

Tammy: So, the first question on my list is, did you grow up in Kenosha?

Chelle: Yes, I did.

T: Always lived here?

C: Um, I was born in Chicago, but that’s only because that’s where my parents happened to be living at the time. My mother is from here and my father is a Detroit Italian, which apparently has much connotation that I have never quite figured out.


T: Uh-huh.

C: My mother’s of Italian descent, my father is too, but he worked here. They met and they lived in Kenosha, Chicago and Detroit numerous times. In the four years they were together, I lived in all three places multiple times. I was about four years old when they separated.

T: Okay. Why did you start modeling?

C: It was something that I wanted to do, I had actually, I was pregnant with my oldest child in ‘82. I didn’t realize I was pregnant yet when I first started looking into modeling at Parkside. I then found out I was pregnant, and I thought, it’s perfect. You see the beauty of the pregnant woman in much of the art, in the classic art. I thought it would be a wonderful opportunity. However, my employers at that time were not willing to adjust my schedule and I was not aware that you didn’t have to model every week, that it was here or there. So at the time they were a little less flexible and they had just modified my schedule because of my morning sickness, so they weren’t really willing to modify it anymore. It was something I always wanted to go back to and a few years ago I had attended a friends’ mother’s show at a local gallery and found out they were looking for models and so I said yes.

T: How long ago?

C: I think it’s been four years ago now that I’ve been doing it.

T: Okay. Did you start at Lemon Street?

C: Yes I did. I started at Lemon Street with their open draw, which they no longer offer. And again, I was very inexperienced. I’ve done runway modeling and I have a dance background, and was involved with a pageant system, I don’t even believe it’s still around anymore, North America Pageant Systems. The individual who owned the dance studio that I danced at was a director for that, a regional director, so I had that kind of a background. I had done some modeling for a photographer and, bless him, he is not going to ever show those horrific photographs of me. They were clothed, but I was so stiff. I really didn’t know anything about modeling.
So that was the extent of it. When I decided to do the modeling for open draw at Lemon Street I felt my inexperience was going to a problem. And Melanie [Hovey] was wonderful. She had suggested my picking up books at the library and practicing poses and being able to hold them. You wouldn’t think that that was going to be an issue.

T: I would think it would be really, really hard.

C: They structure it though so that you can build to the longer poses and I will be perfectly honest with anyone that I sit for, if you want an extended pose, it’s going to be seated or reclined. I am not standing for anything probably over twenty minutes, maybe twenty-five. But it depends on the pose and it depends on whether or not I’m braced against something. But it’s the ten, fifteen, twenty-minute poses that are my standing poses.

T: Okay. Why did you start modeling? What about it was appealing? Because I have to say that I could never. And not because there’s something wrong with it, but I just physically could not actually do it.

C: You have to be extremely comfortable in your skin to do nude modeling. You really do. And as I approached forty, there were some things in my life, and I started looking at things that I had not done that I had always wanted to do. This was one of them. I don’t draw, my photographs are not considered art (I’m the last person on the list to take the family photo). But this was something that I could do to contribute to the art community. It was to be a little bit more than a patron of the arts, I could actually be actively involved in the creating of art. And that was a big reason for me to get involved in it. I had started to get involved with the theater as well.
These were things that I had basically put on hold as I raised a family and I don’t know why. I visited galleries with my kids, we would do museums and galleries and things like that and when my twins were small and I was an at-home mom I used to hang around downtown with two artists in the area and it was great. Talking art, talking different things with them. I never sat for them. Well, actually one of them did do an impromptu sketch of me while sitting at the port one night [laughs]. Which I have, signed, dated and framed. Again it was something that I had started that I put off doing. Something I always wanted to be involved in. And it’s my contribution to the art community.

T: Okay. That’s what I was looking for. Is there anything about it that’s ever made you uncomfortable? Has there ever been a moment when you felt like, “I don’t want to be doing this right now. This does not feel good right now”?

C: Only from my inexperience. I have done the open draw modeling for Lemon Street, which is no instruction. There is a timekeeper, so that I know what my poses are, because like I said, they get progressively longer. And I’ll do the seated or reclined poses as I get into it. And then you have the modeling for the Universities, those are classes, and that’s where the instructor or professor basically tells you what they’re looking for. When I first started doing this I felt nervous and inexperienced, except that I had been doing the open draws for a little while and it was comfortable there and then to go and do this for a professor who was going to expect something different.
I went from Lemon Street and then started at Parkside and I was extremely nervous my first night there. That would probably be the only moment that I have that I said, “Why am I doing this?” When I was really inexperienced at it. Or if it’s someplace new that I haven’t sat for before. I do have moments of nervousness.
The nudity part of it doesn’t make me nervous. Again, I am just very comfortable in my skin and for me it isn’t nudity in erotic sense. It’s more nudity in an anatomical sense. And I know that’s how the artists look at you. It’s not from an erotic point of view. It can be, it can be sensual and it can be extremely erotic, depending on the piece that’s created, but that’s not how it feels when I’m doing that. If that is what the artist creates then that’s their voice. It’s not anything in regards to my modeling or the sitting that I’m aware of.

T: How does your family, your kids, feel about [your modeling]?

C: I have a daughter who’s going to be twenty-five, a daughter who is twenty-one and I have twin boys that are eighteen. Only one of my children has seen any of the pieces that I have modeled for. My second daughter and her boyfriend attended the student show, I think it was a year or so ago, at Lemon Street and Rebecca Venn had a collage of open night, and I was in there about four or five times. God love Rebecca, she’s an awesome artist and timekeeper as well, and she was joking with my daughter and her boyfriend that it was like “Where’s Waldo?” Try to pick mother out. When they first came in to the gallery, it was the brick gallery where they did the exhibit there was a good-sized reclining frontal nude on the wall and he paused. My daughter didn’t pause, her boyfriend did. I assured him that that one wasn’t me.
Holiday dinners are not as uncomfortable as one would think. His parents were quite surprised that he had gone to the gallery opening and as far as I know it didn’t make them uncomfortable. My sons have not seen any pieces and my eldest daughter, she’s pretty open, and think if she did, if she was in town, she would attend and it wouldn’t bother her. As far as I know. No one has come right out and said, “Mom I really wish you wouldn’t do that.”

T: What about besides the children, does anyone else in the family have opinions?

C: My sister once said that I do it because I’m an exhibitionist. I don’t think she really understands the connection that I have to the art community and why I do this. And that is a misconception that a lot of people have.
I will honestly tell you that I do not have the support of my spouse. Part of it would be again the misconception as to why I do it. You have to be really secure in a relationship for a partner to accept what the other person is doing. I think if I was married to someone who was an art person, someone who enjoyed the theater as much as I did, or enjoyed the art galleries as much as I did, he would understand that it isn’t a sexual thing. It’s an art thing. But he’s not comfortable with that at all.

T: Yeah, I think if someone can’t appreciate art that most of them would see it as, “Oh, she’s naked and letting people look at her naked.”

C: Yeah, it’s not nude figure drawing it’s [Chelle and Tammy together]: Naked.
There is a distinction. And you know what, I’ve been introduced as a model and you can usually see when it dawns on them; the emotions displaying across their face and then the raised eyebrows and then the smile. You just have to let them have that moment. More often than not I will find that men will smile appreciatively about it and women all seem to think that I must have a perfect figure. If I’m willing to do this, I must have a perfect figure. And I don’t.

T: See I don’t think of it as that, I just think you must be very, very comfortable.

C: I am.

T: And before you said when you started thinking about doing this, I was going to ask if you would have felt comfortable doing this at thirty, because I’m thirty now and I think that I’m more comfortable with myself now then I was at twenty, but I still don’t think that at forty I’ll be ready for anything like that, but for some people there’s thirty and that’s kind of a milestone and you’re comfortable with certain aspects of yourself and your life and at forty here’s the next step. But if you were already thinking about doing it before…

C: I was when I was, like I said, a teenager and I’ve gone through phases and moments of insecurity and self esteem issues. I think we all do. When we question ourselves. I don’t know that I would have been able to do it at thirty. I already had my family and I pretty much have the same figure I did back then.
I had, about six years ago, some events in my life that made me really examine where I was. Had I accomplished everything that I wanted to accomplish in life? Could I look back and say yes, this was a good life. And there were many factors that occurred at that point and I just kept coming back to the things that I hadn’t done. Some day I’ll get back into dance again. Because it’s something that I thoroughly enjoyed when I was in high school and as a young adult. And the modeling and being involved in the art community was one of the other things and I pretty much looked at it as, What did I have to lose? I was much more confident to be able to take a leap into the unknown than I would have been at thirty. I think as we age women tend to get a little more comfortable in themselves. That is a big reason I was able to do this.
Imagine yourself in your own household, are you comfortable naked or nude in your own household?

T: Um, I don’t generally walk around, because Jason is twelve now and he’s at an age…

C: Where society has told us that we have to be more discreet. Yes.

T: Right. I mean he’s seen me in underwear, but not fully nude in years. But Emma and Keagan, sure.

C: That’s just it, same gender, there’s nothing to it for a same gender child to view you in a state of undress. But society has dictated that you treat opposite gender children in a different manner once they get to a certain age. Why is it that society can not handle nudity?

T: I don’t know. Why can’t you just be naked?

C: Why is it that they’ll take a pregnant woman as a symbol of motherhood, which it is, it’s an obvious symbol. But she’s an obvious sex symbol. Take any women you know, line them up and the pregnant one is the one that you know has had sex. Yet we don’t equate pregnancy to being sexually active. Motherhood is probably as far removed from sexuality as anything.

T: Very strange.

C: There was a piece in Lemon Street that was of the backside and I was sure it was me, but Melanie had commented that it was too voluptuous for me, apparently she felt that my figure was not quite that full of a figure. I mean it wasn’t excessively large, but she assumed that I was smaller than that. And I was like, “No that pretty much looks like me.”

T [laughing]: “That’s my butt.” You had said that there was a student who had once tried to knock you down a peg or two.

C: Yes. It was during break and a male student, I try not to look at the artwork unless the artists say that I can. It’s funny, I’m willing to be nude in front of strangers, but to have a stranger look at their work… They’re very shy, they’re very insecure, even the very gifted students. And you will see in the class, there are some that are above and beyond the other students in skill and ability. They’re just phenomenal artists. You know that they’re going to go somewhere with their art if they pursue it. So this was during a break and I won’t look at the work unless I’ve been invited or I asked the student. I happened to be in the room with students and a couple of them were milling around and at one point this male student said, “Well, if you really wanna know what you look like, you should look at our work.” And it wasn’t so much the statement, not the words, it was his tone. He had a very bully-like demeanor and I could tell that this young man is just used to being negative, aggressive and just a bully. I just turned to him and, I mean how serious can you be standing there in a fluffy robe and slippers, and I said, “I know exactly what I look like and I’m very comfortable with how I look. I don’t need to look at your work.” And that was that.

T: I would have cried. You know, I can defend any part of myself, except for my nakedness.

C: You can defend your personality…

T: I can defend anything else and I would have come right back at him with something, unless he had seen me naked.

C: I have seen the renditions from different artists of my body and again they all have different skill levels and you have their eye, so um, you have to be able, if you’re going to look at the work, I know that I have a fuller figure, I know exactly what my breasts look like, I know what my stomach look like. I know how they both got there. A lot of it is childbearing and breast-feeding. Um, I’m not as firm and perky as I used to be unless the room gets cold [laughs].
I have seen my mother’s figure in some of the drawings and that probably is harder to take. It’s not just from the neck down that it’s my mother’s figure. As a child I once told my mother that her stomach looked like pizza dough. My grandparents owned a pizzeria and it looked like the dough in the big industrial mixer. Well you do not tell your mother that as a child because Fate remembers it and they go, “You need a belly like that ,too.” So I do. I have had four children. My twins were huge. They were 8lbs 8oz and 7lbs 9oz. You don’t have babies that big and stretch the belly out that far and not have it be full of interesting grooves and creases and mounds.
But I saw my mother’s face, my mother is a very attractive woman, she’s a classic beauty, flawless skin. I hate her, I don’t think she’s ever had a blemish in her life, but part of it is to realize that I shall age like my mother has. My mortality is kind of hard to take, more than the physical characteristics that I see of my mother’s is the fact that I am not the child that I used to be and I have become a mature woman.

“I’m tired of struggling to find a philosophy which will fit me and my world. I want to find a world that fits me and my philosophy.”
-Anais Nin

Chelle Krome you have been “Exposed”

Tammy Peacy finds time to write between loads of laundry in the basement of the home she shares with her husband, Steve, and their three children. Her writing has been published in AntiMuse, Chick Flicks Ezine, The Write Side Up, and Wanderings Magazine, and ExposeKenosha.com

2 comments ↓

#1 Joe on 11.18.07 at 1:56 pm

Okay! I confess.
Surprise, I’m a Tammy Fan.
Tammy is impressive, not for being consistently very good, but by continuing to grow and share.
Thank You, Tammy.
And thank you, Chelle, for sharing a personal and fascinating story.
A delightful read.
Joe

#2 Rebecca on 11.18.07 at 7:06 pm

Working with Chelle is always rewarding. She consistently provides inspiration thanks to her creative viewpoint. She comes prepared with colorful props that delight an artist’s eye and keeps our brains stirring with new ideas. It is a delight to have a muse that is professional and innovative. Thanks Chelle, we all enjoy working with you.

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