Visiting a friend last year, painter Anne Siems was struck by her ten-year-old daughter. “She had an odd beauty that you have to look twice to see. She’s a redhead, and you can’t see her eyebrows or eyelashes very well. She doesn’t have the normal social graces–she isn’t trained to be cute. Unlike most little girls she seems unconcerned with showing herself off or with what other people will think of her. There’s something enigmatic about her–you can’t really tell what she’s thinking. She seems vulnerable and self-confident at once. I feel like she’s my muse.” Most of Siems’s portraits at Peter Miller are painted from photographs of the girl. Now 40, Siems painted self-portraits when she was younger, but “I can’t imagine painting myself at this point,” she says. “I can project more onto her because she doesn’t have that history.” Siems made several paintings of the girl she thought had more energy than her other works, and wondered whether that was because the redhead was a living person. But after photographing a couple of friends and painting them, she found that she “didn’t feel that need to return to their faces. This little girl is the only person that I want to keep going back to.”
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How does Siems’s child model respond to the paintings? “She thinks they’re weird–she makes a face.” But her mom, who loves them, bought one.
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