When she's not striding down the catwalk, the model Naomi Preizler is often to be found backstage, sketching her world in all its extraordinary glory.
Fashion's not all glamour, you know. Like that of a film star, the life of a professional model tends to involve lots of tedious hanging around - queuing for castings, queuing for fittings, waiting for four hours to see if your face fits the bill for this season's Calvin Klein show… While some girls might use this time to micro-edit their Facebook profiles or begin cultivating that inner diva, the Argentine model Naomi Preizler reaches for her pencil.
The 21-year-old, who has walked in catwalk shows for labels such as Alexander Wang, Chanel, Givenchy and Balenciaga, and has been photographed in magazines including Italian Vogue, Interview and Love, is fast becoming fashion's unofficial artist in residence, doing lightning-quick sketches of her sister models backstage, and bold, larger-than-life self-portraits. And it was queuing in the ateliers of grand designers that proved the inspirational catalyst.
'You know, you're watching Jean Paul Gaultier or Nicolas Ghesquière designing - they're artists. It's a great opportunity,' she says, in the office of her London model agency, Premier. 'I realised fashion students, for example, would die to see this.'
Having grown up in an artistic household in Buenos Aires - her father an architect and sometime oil painter, her grandmother a sculptor - Preizler has been obsessed with both art and fashion from a young age. She was spotted by a model scout aged 14 but didn't take up modelling until she left high school. In the meantime she had started producing her own versions of fashion images that caught her eye. She still has a 1995 issue of Italian Vogue bought while on holiday in Rome with her family, from which she did drawings of a Moschino advertising campaign.
When her international career finally began, a world of fine art also opened. 'I was living in Paris, going to the Louvre, seeing the Old Masters,' she says, in her accented but perfect English. 'I discovered Schiele's work, which I'd seen in books, but when you see them in person it's different. In Argentina we don't have access to anything like that, but in Europe you're surrounded by it.'
In 2007 she found herself at a Balenciaga fitting in the presence of the house's designer, Nicolas Ghesquière. 'He was sketching and there was this beautiful coat from the show and I thought, "I want to draw this!"' She started taking her sketchbook along to model castings. 'You're in line-ups for an hour, two hours,' she says.
'All the girls are listening to music or reading or chatting and I was talking to nobody, so I started sketching. I wore my sunglasses so nobody could see me looking at them.'
Her drawings have to be quick - 'The girls move on all the time' - and she sometimes leaves them half-finished, liking the sketchiness of the figures. Preizler develops some initial drawings into paintings, using lurid colours that burst out of the page almost monstrously. A backstage self-portrait sketched at a Chanel fitting - the reflected figure is herself as artist, the other figure herself as Chanel model - was fleshed out afterwards on paper in acrylic, combined with watercolour, ink and pencil. She also paints on canvas in oil brightened with acrylic paint to make the colour more vibrant. The effect, combined with the exaggerated features she gives herself - 'I always do thick eyebrows and strong features and skinny figures because it's a version of me' - is carnivalesque.
Her peers have differing reactions. 'Some of the girls don't like it, and some people really like it and say, "Oh, I see you're sketching me, Naomi. OK…"' - Preizler strikes a challenging 'model' pose in imitation - '"…let's see what you've got!"'
With such unique inside access Preizler's artistic talent is increasingly sought after. She's proud that she's been on the cover of Argentine Harper's Bazaar, with her art featured inside. Jean Paul Gaultier owns the watercolour she did of him and Beth Ditto after his spring/summer 2011 show, and Harvey Nichols recently commissioned Preizler to illustrate its spring/summer 2012 press book. At the next round of international fashion weeks she'll be doing backstage drawings for vogue.com.
Beth Ditto and Jean Paul Gaultier
Preizler, it seems, has found that elusive path of working and indulging her passion at the same time. 'For me fashion and art will always go alongside each other,' she says.
BY KATE FINNIGAN | 05 FEBRUARY 2012
http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/columns/kate-finnigan/TMG9057196/Naomi-Preizler-fashions-in-house-artist.html
