Annie Tritt for The Bay Citizen

Miguel Casteneda, 36, poses for an art class at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts in Alameda

Carla Kandinsky began her career as a muse almost 50 years ago, when the art school graduate from whom she was renting a room in Berkeley eyed her as a potential life-drawing subject.

“I had a low-paying job, and I was looking for work,” said Kandinsky, now 74. “My landlady said, ‘You can really sit still — you should try to model.’ I said, ‘You mean the take-my-clothes-off kind of modeling?’”

By the 1960s, Kandinsky was sitting for some of the most influential local artists of the time. The Bay Area Figurative Movement, a group of midcentury painters who famously bucked the Abstract Expressionist style then dominant, was in full swing. And Kandinsky, no relation to the abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky, enjoyed regular sessions with Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and Frank Lobdell, prominent members of the movement.

She had joined the ranks of a group that was often seen but little heard: the artists’ models. Over the last century, many local artistic subjects have been professional, paid artists’ models, a full- or part-time occupation for hundreds of Bay Area residents.

“People think it’s really easy,” says Barbara Tooma, 62, an artists’ model in the Bay Area and elsewhere for more than four decades. “I tell people, ‘If you think modeling is so easy, you try standing up for 20 minutes and be completely still.’”

Workers like Tooma and Kandinsky have been a driving force in the art scene in the Bay Area, a region known for teaching venues like the California College of the Arts, as well as for a vibrant figurative painting and drawing community that has expanded well beyond the academic settings.

Peter Steinhart, in his 2004 book, "The Undressed Art: Why We Draw," counted at least 80 Bay Area community drawing groups and noted that “drawing from live nude models used to be something that one had to enroll in an art school to do.”

For 65 years, the Bay Area Models Guild, a nonprofit, has regulated the work standards and conditions of many of these muses.

Founded by Florence Allen, a top area artists’ model, the guild sets up its clients (carefully screened artists) with its members (carefully screened models). Its goal has been to reduce the risks models face and to support the vital role they play in the creation of artwork.