'Face of Chanel Gives Up Modeling For Art'
heat...@excite.co.uk
February 28 1999
ECOSSE
She is Scotland's own golden girl but Kirsty Hume wants to give up the
catwalk and become known as an artist, as she told Allan Brown
Model art
Piled high and pretty by the sands of Miami Beach, the Shelbourne hotel
looks like a tower block designed by Disney. This is art deco country,
Sunrise Strip: a world of jazzy 1950s contours and blazing colours, the
kind of backdrop that seemed custom-built for Sinatra and his Rat Pack,
with the Shelbourne among its crowning glories.
But no matter how good the exterior looks, the inside always looks
better, for the Shelbourne has a sideline in hosting the scores of
modelling agencies that operate in the town. Till late in the evening,
the cavernous lobby is adorned by flocks of willowy, sun-bleached
blondes waiting to audition. They smoke with heroic determination and
adjust their portfolios as flashbulbs pop repeatedly in side rooms.
Application forms litter the tables, revealing all this to be small-time
stuff: jobs in motor shows, swim-wear and hand cream.
"Catalogue cattle calls," is how Kirsty Hume describes these gatherings,
and she would know. Before becoming the face of Chanel, before the
annual earnings of $3m and the Vogue covers, Hume spent six months on
the same Miami circuit, battling it out with locals for day jobs and
small breaks. Her progress to the front rank of the international
supermodel corps has been beyond the wildest dreams of Miami's hardened
professionals.
Which means it must be off any scale known to those who grew up with
Hume in the sleepy environs of Ayr. Even so, Hume is forsaking the sharp
end of the glamour world with much the same relief as she left behind
the less rewarding version shown at that hotel in Miami Beach.
A student of art at Ayr College, Hume famously gave up a place at
Dundee's Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art when the catwalk beckoned
(the story isn't wholly true: Hume made it only onto the reserve list
for a place). But art has remained Hume's first love. In the living room
of her aunt Linda's house in Dunfermline, she describes it as her "true
passion". Within two years Hume hopes to have given up full-time
modelling and have forged a career as a painter. A model's career is, of
necessity, short, although top practitioners such as Naomi Campbell and
Linda Evangelista are surviving longer, often into their thirties. Hume,
however, is getting out early, with nary a lingering look back to a life
of stretch limousines, Caribbean hotels and round-the-clock access to
Johnny Depp.
Yesterday, the first day of the Milan Fashion Week, she was in
Cowdenbeath to open a pet shop in the High Street run by her cousin,
Louise Taylor, and judge a bonny dog competition. When she returns to
New York at the end of March, she will begin work on designing a studio
building in the grounds of her Woodstock home, and return to painting
classes at the New York School of Visual Art. Her father, Russ Hume, who
remains at the family home in Ayr, says his daughter plans to open a
gallery and cosmetic store in the Big Apple, in which her work will be
sold. For her, he adds, modelling has palled: "It's not a brain
exercise, is it?" he asks.
In the five years since she first drifted down a catwalk, Hume has
become a global figure. Cindy Crawford now finds herself described in
Harper's Bazaar as "Kirsty, a decade down the road". In 1996, at the age
of 20, Hume was on People Magazine's annual 50 most beautiful people
list. The years since have brought the Chanel contract, a move to New
York and a feverishly reported marriage to actor Donovan Leitch on the
banks of Loch Lomond. In June, Vogue will devote an unprecedented
20-page spread to Hume, shot by Madonna's court photographer, Herb
Ritts, in Los Angeles and New Mexico.
It has been a remarkable, unprecedented rise. The gene pool in the west
of Scotland may not be the world's most auspicious but somehow it
produced a beauty as clear and crystalline as the waters that lap Miami
Beach. Or beauty of a kind: Hume is "an exceptional blank," thinks Guy
Trebay of Harper's. But blank or merely versatile, Hume's height (5ft
11in), her bee-stung lips and sheer curtain of blonde hair have marked
her out as Scotland's first and only contribution to the supermodel
stable.
Hume's agent Saif Madhy, of the Paris-based Viva organisation, takes
issue with the supermodel label. "Kirsty is not a supermodel, she is a
star of fashion photography. Her pictures are a project between her and
photographers and designers. She has a more artistic approach to the
business."
The adjective is appropriate. All who know her speak of Hume's devotion
to family. It was the family, or rather a distant branch of it, that
sparked her interest in the visual. Russ Hume recalls the interest the
adolescent Kirsty displayed in several works kept around the house by
William Russell, her maternal great-grandfather, who combined his day
job as a coffin-engraver with semi-professional stints as a landscape
painter around Dunfermline.
"I don't know where the interest came from," says Hume. "My mum used to
say that from the age of two I'd spend hours on the floor pouring out
drawings. I think it's just something you're born with, like a gift for
singing."
She entered the renowned Wellington School for Girls in Ayr in 1987:
"The best school in the area with an excellent tradition in academic
drawing," says Hume's former art tutor Fiona Scott-Brown. "She received
a good grounding in the basics."
But as the gawky, gangling adolescent became a gawky, gangling young
woman, another possibility presented itself. In 1989, on holiday in
Miami with her late mother Jean, Hume was introduced to its small-time
modelling scene and followed up on her return to Scotland, working first
for the Liz Bisset agency in Ayr, then Marco Rasala in Glasgow. She left
Wellington with four Highers and an arts foundation pass, then returned
to Miami, this time to the more prestigious Rumour agency. Sent to Paris
for a couture show, Hume was spotted by the photographer Patrick
Demarchelier, who recommended her in 1994 to Elite Premier in New York.
She never looked back.
Scott-Brown remembers Hume well, having tutored the teenager in an Ayr
College foundation course designed to prepare her for art school. She
recalls how the model displayed a good sense of colour and strong,
individual drawing skill. But her comments thereafter are less
encouraging: "Kirsty was an averagely good student, more of a designer
than a painter really.
"In Kirsty's year were some students of considerable excellence. I'd
love to say Kirsty was one of them but sadly she wasn't, although she
was certainly the nicest in the class. She wasn't as focused as she
needed to be, or advancing at the rate of other students, because
modelling was beginning to occupy her thoughts. She was a beautiful girl
and a beautiful person but with just a fair measure of talent."
Some of Hume's work was seen in 1993 at Ayr's MacLaurin Gallery in a
degree show organised by Scott-Brown. The tutor, who last saw Hume six
months ago, suspects she knows why Hume is reconsidering her first
passion: "Kirsty is a very smart girl and knows that sooner or later the
tits will begin to sag.
"Not," she adds, "that Kirsty has any . . ."
Russ Hume says: "Kirsty has never truly enjoyed modelling. It would be
fair to say she dislikes it, in fact. She doesn't relish being dressed
up, made up and pushed down a catwalk. The modelling won't go on
forever. Already she's combining it with art and I think the art will
take over within a year. Certainly this is her last year of full-time
modelling."
Five of the model's artworks still hang on the walls of her father's
house. Do they demonstrate that Hume has what it takes to develop a
career? John Quinn, fine arts administrator at the Glasgow School of
Art, isn't impressed. He considers a rendering of a nude figure in
pastels that Hume produced in 1994. "This looks like the kind of stuff
you get in Woolworths," he sniffs.
He compares the Life Study with Utensils, a still life of kitchen
implements, also from 1994: "In terms of the way she's drawn the body
here and in terms of the way she's drawn the pots here, it looks like
everything has been made out of the same material. I get the impression
that she's trying to make everything glossy and smooth. Maybe it fits in
with the modelling world.
"I'm not saying she could not become an artist," Quinn adds, "but
judging from these she'd need to put in an awful lot of work to
succeed."
Hume herself dismisses the criticisms: "Those are old things, not
representative of what I'm trying to do now," she says. "I was only 18,
I didn't have any life experience. I might not have a degree in art, and
that's one of the big regrets of my life. But I've got a degree in life
now and that goes into my work."
But modelling left little time to pick up a brush: Hume recalls feeling
"rusty" when she returned to art classes in New York. "But it's like
riding a bike, you never forget completely," she adds. "It was very
emotional to go back to painting after so long. So many feelings get
suppressed; you pick up a brush and it's like a dam bursting."
She cites only two influences: Egon Schiele, the Austrian expressionist,
whose work often finds a home in student halls, and hardy perennial
Salvador Dali. Hume is reluctant to describe her own contemporary work:
"It's difficult to describe what I see in my head," she says. "I've had
so many ideas in the past five years and I can't wait to put them on
canvas, to see if they match my vision of them. I steer clear of
abstracts and I'm not ready yet to work in oils. It's work that will
represent me as a person better than modelling ever did. The best
description is that I do portraits of people in their environments, done
in water-based paints."
Is Hume aware that, in leaving a highly lucrative career for the sake of
what could turn out a pipe dream, she might be considered eccentric or
misguided? "Of course. But I never intended being a model for more than
a year. It's all taken off to a degree I didn't anticipate and I got
swept along. I've no passion for modelling. I'm more of a home person: I
like to sleep in my own bed, I don't like having 200 people around me at
the same time, I get lonely away from home. Other people might think I'm
mad but I don't."
And if she is criticised for selling work on the back of a famous name?
"People say I'll have it easy. But what they don't know is the work it
took to get that famous name. Okay, it wasn't work in the art field, but
I still refuse to feel bad. I hope I doesn't come across like I'm a
dabbler or something. I'm not. I don't worry about the art world being
bitchy. No matter how bitchy it is, it can't be bitchier than
modelling."
Modelling has provided Hume "a degree of financial security" but she
still hopes to make her living from art. She has been approached by a
number of New York agents and will begin discussions with them "once I
feel I have good enough work". In the meantime, she gets irritated that
some find comedy in the idea of a mere model going highbrow, in a Mona
Lisa moving to the other side of the easel.
"The public should get used to the idea that models can have deeper
levels," she says. "I'd rather be remembered as a famous painter than a
famous model, so I have to start the ball rolling now. I'm completely
committed to my art, and I'll do anything to support myself. And if it
all fails? I'll probably have no option but to open a little bed and
breakfast in Woodstock . . ."
The life and times of Kirsty Hume
September 1975 Born in Ayr to Russell and Jean Hume.
1980-1992 Attends Wellington School for Girls in Ayr.
1988 Initially visits Miami with her mother where a career in modelling
is first mooted.
1990 Her mother dies of a brain haemorrhage leaving her father, an
electrical engineer, to bring her and her younger brother, Eliott, up
alone.
1992 Prior to starting her degree in art at Dundee University she takes
another holiday to Miami, where she is spotted by a model agent. She
soon starts modelling couture and graces the Paris and London fashion
shows in her first season, turning her back on her studies.
1993 Comes to the attention of internationally renowned photographer
Patrick Demarchelier and moves to New York where she signs with agency
Elite Premier.
1994 Secures a lucrative contract worth a reported $5m as the Face of
Chanel.
1995 Meets Donovan Leitch after actress Gwyneth Paltrow leaves him. The
pair soon become an item. September
1997 Marries Leitch, son of 1960s pop star Donovan in a glittering
ceremony at Cameron House on the banks of Loch Lomond.
1998 Makes it clear in several press interviews that modelling is not as
enjoyable as she once thought, and she would consider giving it up for a
career as an artist.
February 1999 Turns her back on £12,000 in fees on the opening day of
Milan Fashion Week to open her cousin Louise Taylor's pet shop in
Cowdenbeath.
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