Gala has spent years posing for artists, which means she has seen hundreds of versions of her own body made by hundreds of different hands.
Almost nobody gets that. Most of us have a handful of photographs and a mirror, and from that thin evidence we decide what we look like. She has a room full of people drawing her at the same moment, and by the end of the session there are twenty different answers on twenty different sheets of paper, none of which agree.
We wrote to her because being looked at is her job, not her anxiety.
Everywhere else in this subject, the person is trying to control how they come across. Here that control is handed over completely, on purpose, for two hours at a time. What comes back from that experience is not what most people would expect, and the last answer in this interview is the one worth reading twice.
What follows is her own account, translated from Spanish and lightly edited.
She answers the way people talk rather than the way people write, and we have kept that. Her replies are short. They are also, in places, sharper than long ones would have been.
You have been posing for artists for years. What have they learned to see in you that you could not see in yourself before you started?
Sometimes it really pleases me to see how I have grown as a model, because they tell me so. The poses get more and more experimental, which means my body is more of a body, more flexible. Also when I get stronger. They help me have self-esteem about my muscles, ha.
A drawing and a photograph of the same pose end up as two different things. What does the pencil catch that the camera leaves out?
Ufff, everything. In my opinion they are not alike in any way. A drawing catches something the photograph does not. You see the artist’s work, the technique, the style. The method makes it all different from a camera, which captures what is there. And so far few people who draw me have caught me exactly as I am.
You work in person and online. What changes in a session when the artist is on the other side of a screen instead of in the same room?
Simple. Online is still a 2D view. There is nothing like being present with a living body in movement.
A lot of people say they could not last five minutes posing in front of strangers. From what you see, what is it that actually frightens them?
I think there are many factors. I would say modesty. I have been a dancer and a gymnast since I was a child, environments where nudity is shared and even touching other bodies is part of the work. I have always loved my body and loved every part of it, even though it is not perfect. I see it as a tool that I take great care of, and it is part of my work.
Before anyone draws anything, you already know whether a pose works. What are you reading to decide that?
The number of people there, where I am posing, the lighting, and whether there is a theme for the session.
You have seen hundreds of drawings of your own body made by very different hands. What happens when a drawing is good but does not look like you?
It looks like the artist, and that is what I love about this work.
Your job is to be looked at. How do you get on with being looked at outside the session, in the street or in front of the mirror?
Completely differently. The looks in a session are focused on shadows, light, muscles, shapes, and I promise you those looks are not much like the ones outside.
Is there a drawing of you that changed how you see yourself? What was in that one?
Mmm, even though it sounds superficial, it is the drawings where I am bloated, ha, or not in a very aesthetic pose. Those make me feel more human.
Three things worth taking from this conversation.
First, that a portrait is not a measurement of the sitter. Twenty people draw the same body and produce twenty different bodies, and the good ones are recognisably by that artist rather than of that model. Second, that what stops most people from being looked at is not their body but their relationship to being seen, and that relationship is trained, not inherited. She was trained early and never had to fear it. And third, the one that goes straight to the centre of this project: the drawing that made her feel most human was the unflattering one. Perfection reads as a surface. A body caught on an ordinary day, bloated, badly posed, still itself, reads as a person.
Gala works as a life model for artists in person and online: instagram.com/artmodelgala