Our Pantheon of Artists

Photographer: STEVE PARKE @steve.parke
Model: TEE PIMENTEL @teepimentel
Wardrobe: JILL ANDREWS GOWNS @jagowns
Muah: NIKKI VERDECCHIA @nikki.verdecchia
Backdrop Paintings: NICHOLE LEAVY ART @nicholeleavyart Jewelry: PARRISH RELICS @parrish_relics
Photographer’s Assistant: BRITT OLSEN-ECKER @brittolsenecker

This time-traveling cover story shoot was conjured by a Baltimore team that’s worked together several times before for Enchanted Living. Of course, when you’re featuring a saint and a goddess, you need a unique pantheon of artists.

To re-create these two Renaissance-era paintings, we first needed some … painting, so we called upon artist Nichole Leavy to create custom backdrops, like the ones she so gorgeously crafted for our Nautical and Medieval issues. Her Primavera grove (pictured in its full glory at bottom left) is a stylized version of Botticelli’s original, she says, since the original is so rich and detailed. “I took certain liberties and simplified,” she says, “omitting the figures, of course, and ‘opening up’ the middle foliage. I also changed the original orange trees (a symbol of the Medici Family) into peach trees to be cheeky.” Her Saint Catherine backdrop was much smaller, as she needed to paint it quickly, but it worked perfectly, as you can see.

Both goddess and saint had to have amazing dresses, so we went to wedding- gown designer Jill Andrews, who made pieces for our Celestial and Decadence cover shoots. For Venus’s complicated radiance, she layered white silk chiffon over metallic gold lamé, then hemmed the edges of the chemise using a technique that makes “the perfect ruffle you see in old paintings.” She re-created the ornamental bra from a piece she found online and then hand-covered it with beaded trim. “It was fun to interpret and source all the various details,” Andrews says. She made our saint’s dress from an extremely fine iridescent silk, binding the neck with black velvet and using black cotton bobbinet (a sort of netting) over a bright chartreuse-green charmeuse to get just the right shading on the sleeves. The overdress is a luscious silk and rayon velvet lined with saffron silk taffeta to get the perfect era-appropriate drape.

Of course, we also needed someone who could embody both a goddess and a saint, and we were thrilled to finally put Tee Pimentel on our cover. You’ve seen Tee many times in these pages already, and you might also know her as the magical wing maker behind Creatures Who Craft. Have you ever seen a model move more fluidly from goddess to saint and back again? “It was almost like I was swaying in a dance with friends,” she says, when describing posing as Venus. She does admit to having had a little more trouble with Saint Catherine. “The model in the original painting was really leaning into that wheel at an odd angle,” she says, reflecting on the lack of torture devices in the Enchanted Living shoot, which we do try to make general policy.

Tee arrived at the shoot with jewelry from Parrish Relics, whose treasures we’ve also featured numerous times. Our

goddess and our ladies on pages 18 and 19 are wearing artist Jen Parrish-Hill’s handmade floriated amulet and clover earrings (bottom center), inspired by the Miracle Windows of the Trinity Chapel in Canterbury Cathedral. Our saint is wearing her trois fleurs sacrées amulet and earrings (bottom right), inspired by the mille-fleurs tapestries of medieval Europe. How gorgeous are they?

And then Nikki Verdecchia—who has contributed to more shoots for this magazine than we can count—once again worked her hair and makeup magic, keeping Tee’s hair and skin soft and natural, with a glowy lip … for that delicate luminescence worthy of goddess and saint. Because we shine as both, don’t we?

And, finally, photographer extraordinaire Steve Parke, who’s now up to his sixteenth cover for us, worked to replicate the feel of the original paintings by using static lighting rather than strobe lights, which tend to throw a more even light source everywhere in the space. “This allowed me to move the light sources wherever I wanted and achieve a softer, more painterly quality to the images,” he says. Britt Olson-Ecker of local band The Outcalls was also there to assist; everyone knows that it never hurts to have a goddess of music on hand, no matter your endeavor.