AMANDA BOXTEL

Amanda Boxtel came to Aspen from Australia seventeen years ago to "follow her heart." She stood five seven, blond, an amazing skier and amazing looking. She is also incredibly kind and smart and optimistic. She sits now because at noon (crack of noon club) she took her first run of the day. She had stuff on her mind, she told me as I painted her. "I had a hunch I shouldn't be there. I was really on edge. But I ignored it. I didn't know myself well enough then to understand that I have an uncanny ability to sense things."

She continued, "I was just about to start down and was so agitated that another skier actually stopped to ask whether I was OK. I said I was, even though I knew I wasn't but started my descent anyway, whereupon I simply crossed my tips, somersaulted, and landed hard on my low back."

"There was something like an electric shock through my legs, then nothing."

Nothing except the struggle to rebuild her life in amazing ways. Amanda is a teacher by training and temperament. Along with her colleague Houston Cowan, she created Challenge Aspen, a program that gets children and adults with all kinds of physical and mental disabilities into the hills to pursue a broad range of sporting and cultural activities .

I heard about Amanda when I was lying in bed paralyzed from the neck down. We shared the same PT, Conny McClintock, who insisted we meet. We did and became fast friends. She was the first person I wanted to paint when I conceived this project - and one of the last to finally pin down. I literally spent one two-month stretch in Aspen pleading with her to find time to pose.

"I really want to, Hilary, and I'm so sorry but I'm leaving on a trip to Antarctica this week and then there are the Paralympics."

There was nothing for it but to get her to New York, which she did squeezing me in between Broadway shows. I was inspired to paint her nude because she is just so beautiful, particularly her torso. (Only her legs are paralyzed so her torso, her core, is amazingly strong.) Bonnard's bathers came to mind and inspired me to paint Amanda using that convention of the beigneuse. I also mimicked his use of bright color. Ironically, Bonnard's model, his wife, Marthe, was quite disabled emotionally and spent a great deal of time taking baths. By contrast, though in a wheelchair into which she is "transferring," Amanda, is anything but. Yes, she sits, but she does not sit still and she is all heart.