Artwork / Public Faces / John Jelderks (US Magistrate Judge)

Before John would sign my model release form for participating in Public Faces, he asked me to promise him verbally that I wouldn’t do anything in my painting that would make either him or the court look bad. It was interesting to me because I’ve always thought of contracts as being more about mutual understanding than about enforcement—and that’s why I write my own—but I would have thought that a judge would see them differently. The only other person who had such specific ideas about how my model release should be done was this businessman.