Ella Rose: the story: October 2011

Wednesday, 12 October 2011

A wee Scottish plan!

Imminent exotic travel aside, I am also very excited about my recent plans to visit Scotland. My trip is already shaping up nicely, with 4 (and a half) provisional bookings already in my diary for my May 9th-16th visit! Here are my thoughts so far on where I'll be heading...

About flippin' time I made it up to Scotland - this will be my first ever visit!

Saturday, 8 October 2011

Lost Watch

Last night I realised I've lost my watch. My twenty-first birthday present from my parents. White gold. It has a mother-of-pearl face and tiny, delicate, shell-like links in the bracelet. I'm pissed off with myself, but mostly, I'm resigned. This is the second time I've lost it in a month after it being faithfully on my wrist every single day for four years.

It fell off only a few weeks ago on the morning I flew to Vancouver. I cried in the bus terminal like a nutcase, with everyone around me wondering what on earth was wrong and gathering to help me search for it as the sun rose at 5.30am. I wished I wasn't going anywhere at all if it meant I would lose my watch. Then, half way across America, I got a text saying it had been pushed through our letterbox in an envelope with a note from our post lady, who I now adore, saying she'd found it on our driveway. I got the clasp tightened, after that, but even so, that didn't stop it disappearing again yesterday.

But it's only ever the most important things that you lose, isn't it? That has to be the way things are. You can't lose something that doesn't matter to you - there would be no point. Losing the people and things you love most are reminders that you can't, if you're wise, depend on anything staying the same; that nothing and no one truly belongs to you. When you have important things, you know for a fact you'll lose them at some point. My default reaction is to decide never to care much for any one thing ever again, to rely on and trust only myself for constancy of any kind. But a life spent thinking like that would be shit, wouldn't it? Isn't the whole point to abandon yourself to life and the things and people you love, despite knowing you will never truly 'own' them, that they might disappear at any given moment, that they are, ultimately, individual and separate entities from you and you can't really ever know truly what they're going to do next? But if you force yourself to get used to these things or people being gone, and learn to live defiant and free from such neediness, what do you do when they decide to come back?

Photo by Rayment Kirby:

Forgive me for being sentimental... Joni Mitchell's 'Cactus Tree' is in my head and I'm ill for the first time in roughly a billion years. (Did I mention I've also lost my voice? Urgh.)

Monday, 3 October 2011

The Trees...

...They called me to go and model for Dave Aharonian, and what an honour it was! We were very excited to be able to make stuff together for his Rainforest Nudes project (see his incredible website if you happen to feel like being blown away). I just adore his technique and finishes; the pure quality of it needs to be seen in physical prints. We had 40 frames available and about 1.5 hours. Luckily everything just 'clicked'. I hope you like these as much as I do.

Any favourites?!

Also, Dave took these on his iPhone a few mins before we left the house:

...And, just to lower the tone a bit, here are some shots of me on the ferry (also iPhone-snapped - there's just no escaping it, is there?), documenting the perils of long hair in strong winds. In the last one, I was actually being attacked by my own hair. Nice of Dave to help...

Sunday, 2 October 2011

Turning the Wheels

Sometimes, you've just got to cartwheel across the grass. It's an overwhelming urge, especially when you used to do gymnastics (I spent hours and hours doing 'round offs' in the garden. Cartwheeling and hand standing always makes me feel about 8 years old).

These were all taken on the Isle of Wight by Mark Davy-Jones, whose whimsical, sometimes 'twisted', style of post processing is brilliant, and who I'll hopefully be working with again at some point next year. Mark and his lovely wife kindly fed and put me up overnight amongst their gorgeous maine coon cats (sadly I failed to entice one onto my bed at night).

I'm modelling here alongside Miss Kayleigh Lush, who you'll have seen on this blog before. Click to enlarge as always...

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About Me

(For full information, including interviews and publications, see my website.)

Based in Oxfordshire/London, UK (and travelling anywhere and everywhere; click on the 'travel plans' tab near the top!), I'm a dance-trained model and writer. I began modelling for a painter while completing my Masters degree and accidentally carried on. Whether traditional or experimental, from artistic nudes to fashion shots, I strive to work with artists and photographers to help create images which are memorable, beautiful, intriguing or celebratory of the female form.

I am primarily an 'art model', taking bookings directly and independently, but am also represented by commercial agencies. I enjoy versatility and take on work across the spectrum: dance/movement, lingerie, fitness, commercial, lifestyle, wedding, fashion, beauty and portraits.

I've been lucky enough to have worked with some world-renowned photographers and artists, in many different countries and locations, yet some of my favourite images were taken by enthusiastic beginners. I am available for work with photographers, painters and artists of various media, whether amateur hobbiests or experienced industry professionals, for exhibitions, commercial publication or just portfolio building. (I'm never interested in anything remotely 'adult' or degrading.) If you'd like to consider hiring me for your project, please email me at: ellarosemuse@live.co.uk.

My life-long love of dance (I have trained in various/most styles from the age of 3) allows me to use my body awareness to add creativity, expressive lines, grace, character and emotion to images I'm involved with.

This blog is a little diary of my adventures and a fun way for me to share my latest images week by week (and help myself keep track of what I get up to!). Thanks for dropping by! Don't forget to say hi in the comments area, or by email (ellarosemuse@live.co.uk)... Often I struggle to decide which images out of a collection are my favourites; feel free to let me know yours!

Walter De La Mare, 'The Listeners'

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Natasha Khan/Bat for Lashes, 'Horse and I'

Got woken in the night,
by a mystic golden light.
My head soaked in river water.
I had been dressed in a coat of armor. They called
a horse out of the woodland.
"Take her there, through the desert shores."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear.
You're the chosen one, there's no turning back now."

The smell of redwood giants.
The banquet for the shadows.
Horse and I, we're dancers in the dark.
Came upon the headdress.
It was gilded, dark and golden.
The children sang.
I was so afraid I took it to my head and prayed.
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."
They sang to me, "This is yours to wear. You're the chosen one, there's no turning back."

Mark Doty, 'A Display of Mackerel'

They lie in parallel rows,

on ice, head to tail,

each a foot of luminosity

barred with black bands,

which divide the scales’

radiant sections

like seams of lead

in a Tiffany window.

Iridescent, watery

prismatics: think abalone,

the wildly rainbowed

mirror of a soapbubble sphere,

think sun on gasoline.

Splendor, and splendor,

and not a one in any way

distinguished from the other

—nothing about them

of individuality. Instead

they’re all exact expressions

of the one soul,

each a perfect fulfilment

of heaven’s template,

mackerel essence. As if,

after a lifetime arriving

at this enameling, the jeweler’s

made uncountable examples,

each as intricate

in its oily fabulation

as the one before

Suppose we could iridesce,

like these, and lose ourselves

entirely in the universe

of shimmer—would you want

to be yourself only,

unduplicatable, doomed

to be lost? They’d prefer,

plainly, to be flashing participants,

multitudinous. Even now

they seem to be bolting

forward, heedless of stasis.

They don’t care they’re dead

and nearly frozen,

just as, presumably,

they didn’t care that they were living:

all, all for all,

the rainbowed school

and its acres of brilliant classrooms,

in which no verb is singular,

or every one is. How happy they seem,

even on ice, to be together, selfless,

which is the price of gleaming.

Kate Clanchy, 'Poem for a Man with No Sense of Smell'

This is simply to inform you:

that the thickest line in the kink of my hand
smells like the feel of an old school desk,
the deep carved names worn sleek with sweat;

that beneath the spray of my expensive scent
my armpits sound a bass note strong
as the boom of a palm on a kettle drum;

that the wet flush of my fear is sharp
as the taste of an iron pipe, midwinter,
on a child's hot tongue; and that sometimes,

in a breeze, the delicate hairs on the nape
of my neck, just where you might bend
your head, might hesitate and brush your lips,

hold a scent frail and precise as a fleet
of tiny origami ships, just setting out to sea.

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