he first time I saw Suzanne was also my first return in many years to that necessary evil, the dreaded figure drawing exercise. I hardly noticed the short, plump, hausfrau in a flowered cotton dress wandering around the gallery. When she stepped up on the platform, disrobed and assumed her pose, all I cound think was "Now what am I supposed to do about this?" She was fat. A fat lump of a woman was what I saw but that was not all that I began to see of Suzanne, because Suzanne was the ultimate professional nude model. When she posed, she exposed only her "lump" of a self with no shame and with no self-consciousness. She became a perfect being who allowed herself to be explored at will and all in one's own good time.

As the charcoal traced her form, her form became the raison d'êtrefor me as it had, I soon learned, for countless artists in Pittsburgh. "Oh, everyone likes Suzanne" Joe Witzel told me. What did I see in Suzanne? I saw everything. As I drew, she alternately presented the power of a sumo warrior and the fragile defenselessness of a naked woman. Her shoulders were surprisingly beautiful, tiny and delicate, giving evidence of the child she was while her hugh thighs and breasts recalled Maillot's majestic naked woman. Her stoic, static posture conjured up Henry Moore's serene garden sculptures. Her face, impassive and pensive said only, I am here for you to draw me. She had the gift the artist craves in a model -- to be there and to not be while there.

We don't often know very much about our models. They usually prefer to be anonymous. We know only their first names (which may be made up) and sometimes, what they do for a living. How someone can take off their clothes in front of a dozen people and remain anonymous may be a mystery to someone other than an artist, but that's how it is. Models offer their bodies to be studied, to give us the opportunity to learn about form and we respect their privacy. They can offer as much or as little information about themselves as they want to. Suzanne didn't talk very much. In between sessions she would don her flowered housedress and become the ordinary hausfrau I met in the beginning, the sort you wouldn't look at twice on the street. There was no indication of her extraordinary power. Now we know only a little more -- that she was a poet and an artist, that she worked for Just Harvest, that she had no family, that she lived alone and that she died alone. Very few bits of information for someone who in one circle, is a quite famous and celebrated person.

We will never know what, if anything, Suzanne thought about our interpretations of her, or how much of it she ever saw, how much of it she approved of, how much she thought we got right. I wish she could have always been available to draw, but she announced that she was retiring from modeling some months ago. No one knew why. Maybe she was sick. Maybe she was just tired of it. Her withdrawal left a great void that we are still trying to fill.

We would like to say again as we did at the end of each session, thank you Suzanne, for your professionalism, for your patience, for the exquisite form you allowed us to explore and learn from. You are sorely missed and we wish you eternal peace as you continue to live in our hearts and our drawings. I hope we have done you justice.

Lyn Ferlo is Art Editor of The Pittsburgh Quarterly.

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