If you don’t know her, Julie Bell is a former bodybuilder who is married to renowned fantasy and physique painter Boris Vallejo. The couple has a studio in Pennsylvania where they continue to produce works of art depicting strong women. Julie has become known for her futuristic and fantasy paintings, and also for her depictions of techno-organic figures and surfaces. Basically, she’s a beautiful, buff woman who is very, very good at painting beautiful, buff women. As an infinite regression of beauty and buffness, what’s not to like?

Boris has been at it longer than Julie, and as a practical matter one of the things I like best about his paintings is that it’s easy to identity the bodybuilder model in many of his works. So while a suspiciously high number of Vallejo’s muscular female figures in the mid-nineties and aughties strongly resemble his wife Julie - back in the eighties and early nineties Lisa Lorio, Lenda Murray and others turned up often. I believe I recall there was one Boris-commissioned ad for Weider Weight Gain Crap that showed a solid and voluptuous Gladys Portugues at her most beautiful, and that Penny Price may have turned up occasionally in Boris’ paintings. Back then he may have been the only prominent commercial artist completely unafraid to depict sensually muscular female figures. This is probably my favorite.

The last time I wrote about Boris Vallejo, it was to suggest that Jamie Reed had a body that looked as if it could only exist in a Boris Vallejo painting. But I’ve met four or five people who seem to be strongly of the opinion that they have met Jamie Reed, including her sometime workout partner Allison Jones, and I myself saw her on a PATH train platform. So I guess she’s real.

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