Philadelphia Weekly

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Considering the number of years it’s been up and running, Pam Cole’s body is well-preserved. On the other hand, it wouldn’t shame Beyoncé into intensifying her workout regimen. Cole has cellulite around her thighs, some flab on her butt. There are other imperfections too, although her breasts are pretty darn cute.

“When I was 21, I weighed 120,” says the 5-foot-6 Center City resident in her earthy New England accent. “Now I weigh 164. Okay? Look, I got thighs. I got tits.

“I also have a stomach and hips and ass and all that jazz. But what I do isn’t about looking in the mirror and saying, ‘Ooh, I’m so beautiful!’ Okay?”

Cole is okay enough with her physique’s peccadilloes that at 58, she regularly sheds all her clothes in front of people she hardly knows.

She’s a figure model, and according to the artists who sketch and paint her, a good one. Sporting an auburn-tinted, spiky ’do, white toenail polish and nothing save for a bracelet in between, Cole is working today at the Fleisher Art Memorial, a tuition-free academy at Seventh and Catharine in South Philly. She’s standing motionless on a wheeled podium in the center of a second-floor studio, surrounded by eight professional portrait painters. One of her feet is perched on a stool, one of her arms draped around the back of her head. Cole’s timer beeps, prompting her to sit on the stool. A tuft of dark pubic hair is visible atop her crossed thighs.


No, Pam Cole isn’t the mousy type.


“Hey, once you’ve popped out a couple of babies, honey, nothing can embarrass you anymore,” she later explains.


“Pam does very special things with the different parts of her body,” says Taylor. He explains how in one pose, Cole sat on a high stool while strategically placing her feet on a lower one, thus embodying the artistic concept of contrapposto, or one shoulder up, one hip down.


When I sort of let on that I always thought posing in the raw required chutzpah plus a generous supply of air within the poser’s cranium, Taylor responds, “Go home and try it. Try to hold a pose for five minutes and see whether your head or body shifts. Pam shows her experience by assuming poses she knows she can hold. She’s skilled.”


Cole, a Waterbury, Conn., native who relocated to Philly in 1990 and landed her first modeling gig seven years ago, says of her style, “I work the room. 


“Every artist has to get a chance to draw the front and the back of me. A lot of artists like backs and asses, believe me. You have to give them something to work with. You have to work the room.”


Cole, who’s never attended art school—not as a student, anyway—took up painting as a means of coping with her despicable roommate: bipolar disorder.


Diagnosed around age 40, Cole says the illness has put her through hell. 


She’s run the gamut of hard-to-take meds, and has for the most part lost touch with one of her two adult children (and two of her five grandchildren). The model says she’s been labeled a kook and worse by her kids’ father, and called a druggie, a bum and a nigger-lover (the latter epithet apparently inspired by her romantic involvement with an African-American man) by others. There was a suicide attempt amid a stretch of dark days preceding her diagnosis. 


Happily, Cole no longer has the inclination to kill herself. She hasn’t the time for it either, since her days are filled with painting, treks to the gym and modeling gigs. Augmenting the $700 government disability check she gets monthly, she earns $40 or so posing at Fleisher, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), the Hussian School of Art, the Main Line Art Center in Haverford and other respected venues. 


The jobs help her buy groceries for herself and Camille, her two-year-old tiger cat. More significantly, they make her feel less like a pitiable whack-job and more like the warm and talented woman she genuinely is. The fact that she gets to pick up art tips from experts such as PAFA professors while earning pocket money represents icing on the cake. 


The cake itself, of course, is a newfound life that she’s madly in love with. 


“The art and the modeling have allowed me to say, ‘I’m Pam Cole, artist, art model, successful human being,’” she says. “I know what it feels like to say, ‘I’m a fucking nut, and I can’t do anything right, and every time I try to do something right, somebody gives me some shit about it.’ I’ve been there, but I’m not there anymore. This has saved me, and I’m not just saying that. It’s saved me.”

Right now, class is over, and Cole, who’s assumed a variety of two- and five-minute poses, is changing into an attractive summer dress. Meanwhile, Jim Taylor—one of the artists who has spent the last hour sketching Cole—attempts to enlighten me about how figure models bring more to the podium than exhibitionism.
Virtually every inch of wall space in Cole’s private room—an efficiency in the Casa Farnese apartment high-rise at 13th and Lombard—is covered by her own artwork: spectacularly colorful abstract paintings, some done with spray, some by hand, all lovingly framed. She even has them in the bathroom.