From Saving the Life that is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artist’s Life in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose:

There is a letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to Emile Bernard that is very meaningful to me…

However hateful painting may be, and however cumbersome in the times we are living in, if anyone who has chosen this handicraft pursues it zealously, he is a man of duty, sound and faithful.

Society makes our existence wretchedly difficult at times, hence our impotence and the imperfection of our work.

…I myself am suffering under an absolute lack of models.

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard of the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect – even if rejected enrich and enlarge one’s view of existence.