How a Kansas City Mermaid Became Will Cotton’s Muse

Most people don’t think of Kansas City, Missouri, as a hotbed of mythologizing. But the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art is currently showing “Raven Halfmoon: Ride or Die,” which showcases new commissions from the Caddo Nation sculptor known for forcing Indigenous women into the foreground of American history, their ceramic visages glazed in shades of tar, smoke and blood. There, she elevates cowgirls over cowboys as protective totems lording over the prairie. This past August, living legends Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, the latter a tragic hero who succumbed to a siren’s call, opened the steakhouse 1587 Prime, an altar to their past triumphs and obscene display of surreal gluttony, where their faithful can dine on $345 Tomahawks flambéed tableside in a bouquet of herbs, marrow butter and brandy (for an additional $27) like Dido at Carthage. And it’s here that neo-Rococo portraitist Will Cotton found a muse for his latest series of large-scale paintings, “Between Instinct and Reason”—a celebration of the mermaid.

The artist describes the mermaid as the “strongest female character, unimpacted by moral standards and unthreatened by external forces,” a sharp contrast to the daily struggle of Robin Rubash, a trans model and OnlyFans camgirl, who until recently was making ends meet while working from her childhood bedroom.

In The Siren’s Offer (2024), which sold at Galerie Templon in New York this past summer, Rubash’s upturned head and torso serve as the figurehead of a ship arriving at a placid western shore, her upturned tail—a sail—fanning out in the glacial ice blue, white and pink of the transgender flag. She greets the archetype of macho and gay American myth, a faceless Marlboro Man in denim and leather chaps. She offers him a pink frosted cupcake, a signature Cotton confection. He approaches, accepting, but there’s still a gap to bridge between traditional and gay America, and how the trans community will find its feet in that land is something that plays out in Rubash’s everyday life.

“The cowboy is every kind of American frontier myth: the rugged individual, the hero, the outlaw, the person who believes the land is theirs to conquer; the mermaid, on the other hand, belongs to a different mythology; she comes from a realm of fluid identities, shifting bodies and contradictions—alluring and dangerous,” Cotton tells Observer. “I don’t paint with specific political messaging in mind, but I’m always trying to place figures at the edge of something.”

Rubash lives on the edge in Kansas City. She worked on the street before starting an OnlyFans five years ago under her parents’ roof. “But I had to get out of there; they found out how much money I was making and would take it from me, and taxes took the rest, but what I have is enough to make a life in Kansas City,” she says. “And here I’m respected for what I do.”

Here is where she found a rich and welcoming community in the local scene of fellow art school dropouts like the artist Peregrine Honig, whose work focuses on social anxiety and sexual vulnerability. Rubash served as an early muse to Honig, who became her conduit to Cotton. “I was immediately drawn to Robin’s femininity; it’s so painterly,” Honig says. “We became friends very quickly talking about vulnerability and art history, and the history of great artists painting young women in the sex industry. Robin’s like a nymph, and she has this pubescent beauty, but she’s an adult, a grown person who’s also nubile, and in painting her you’re not doing damage to her, she’s sentient—hyper aware—of how she wants to be perceived.”

Their friendship led to Rubash’s participation in Honig’s Ophrys (2021), a recreation of Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1862) with Rubash in the title role. Honig curated a tableau in which Rubash reclined nude among the orchids in Powell Gardens, as invited artists captured the moment between first light and the botanical gardens’ opening hours that morning. Rubash still needed some convincing to pose in front of Cotton, but Honig knew from her own past experience that some people just need an extra push. “This is all a continuum,” Honig explains.

It was a life-drawing class decades earlier that changed the course of Honig’s life and ultimately brought her to Kansas City. As a wayward teenager in San Francisco, Honig found a mentor in the late sculptor Ruth Asawa (whose retrospective at MoMA runs through February 7). Asawa wrote Honig’s letter of recommendation for the Kansas City Art Institute after being impressed by her early drawings, “but she also kicked my ass,” Honig recalls. “When I was 14 or 15, Ruth would take me off-campus to life drawing classes, from the model, like naked, no parental permission, in a room full of adults. I remember I was drawing, fixated on one part of the hand, and she told me ‘You’re not going to come back here if you’re going to do neurotic little drawings, you need to draw the whole figure.’”

Honig stepped up and soon received a scholarship to the Kansas City Art Institute, where she was impressed by the pedigree of professors like Jim Leedy and Ken and Russell Ferguson, as well as the school’s intense foundation program. At the same time, Kansas City offered cheap studio space, while greater Jackson County remains one of the wealthiest enclaves in the Midwest and is home to some of the country’s top private collectors.

So Honig stayed put. She briefly ran a gallery here, and eight years ago started a semi-regular drawing workshop, Bubbles & Bodies, at a local champagne bar. “Will asked if I was going to be hosting a session while he was in town,” she says. There wasn’t another workshop scheduled, but she made it happen so Rubash and Cotton could connect—despite the fact that Rubash had never participated in true figure modeling before. “I had the lighting, the set-up, the supplies he needed, and then he met her, and it was that dream thing, where I said to Robin, this is it. I know you’re shy, I know you get nervous, but you’re going to be safe, and this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I had been trying to get her in front of Will forever, and by the end of the class, he had invited her to New York to draw her.”

Cotton was drawn to Rubash’s “uncommon combination of gentleness and authority, the alluring complexity of her eyes, a face that’s soft but not passive.”

“And this was before he knew about her online persona,” Honig adds.

On social media, and in her sex work practice, Rubash has long gone by the moniker Mermaid Hime Princess. “I have always said, before I die, I want to model as a mermaid, be portrayed as a mermaid, because that goes along with my trans identity,” Rubash explains. “I was attracted to mermaids since I was a little boy, and I’ve noticed throughout the years that mermaids do resonate with a lot of trans people, and I believe there’s this beauty, the long hair—you know, kids who were not allowed to transition still grow out their hair. And they don’t have genitalia, they’re just beautiful creatures, and that’s always spoken to me.”

“I didn’t know about that at first,” Cotton says. “I saw her in class; she had a relaxed confidence in her body, the way she held a pose without stiffening. It wasn’t until later, when we sat down to talk, that she mentioned she’d been obsessed with mermaids since childhood. And I remember laughing, because I’d already begun thinking of her for a mermaid painting.”

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