The Debutante Ball Book

Jamie is the disinherited son of a respected art dealer who, in an act of inspiration and desperation, convinces his room-mate, Winston, to paint his girlfriend, Amelia in the style of Credeaux. The love triangle that develops during the painting causes a lot more consequences than a forged piece of art.
The sad part was to realize that Winston is able to love only the woman in his painting; real women, with their trivial emotions, drive him into crises of impatience.

I wonder how would I feel to have my body regarded by someone else not as the flawed and imperfect thing I thought it is, but as something worth to transmute into art. To an artist, my form can be beautiful precisely because it doesn't match some kind of airbrushed Hollywood-idea of perfection. An artist accepts it precisely as it is; its flaws make his work more interesting: form and pattern, range of lights and shadows. Winston objectifies Amelie, literally makes her into a thing. When, after years, she gazes at that thing, she feels returned to herself again. And the artist, too, feels a kind of love, not for her personally, but for her as the mechanism that allowed his art to come into existence.