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Playboy’s first Puerto Rican Playmate of the Year, Karen Velez, was a muse to many—most recently artist Cristine Brache, who painted one of Velez’s unpublished Playmate photos for our Fall 2026 issue of the magazine.
Velez was Playboy‘s Miss December 1984, before becoming Playmate of the Year in 1985. A Miami native, she said in her 1984 profile that she hoped to one day have 10 children. Well, she married actor Lee Majors and had three—a valiant effort. We found her at a time of exploration: “I want to learn things, do things I don’t know anything about,” Velez said in her 1985 profile. “That’s what I’m aiming for now—to find something to do that I’ve never done before that I can make money at and learn from.”
Brache was glad to discover her, too. Of Puerto Rican descent herself, and born in the same month that Velez made her Playboy debut, Brache said her pull to Velez felt “cosmic.” And when she saw one of the outtakes from Velez’s Playmate of the Year shoot in which Velez is reclining on a couch, surrounded by fur and silk, Brache said she knew immediately that was the portrait she’d paint. “It looked like a painting already,” Brache said.
So, she focused on Velez’s form, stripping away the background details and making it darker, overlaying her signature wax haze over the whole image.
Brache is no stranger to painting Playmates. Her recent exhibition, Centerfolds at Bernheim gallery in London, focuses on former Playmate Dorothy Stratten, who was murdered by her husband at just 20 years old. She’s painted two series including Playmates. “I painted some of her most iconic Playboy photographs, isolating her face and expression in a way that recalls Warhol’s portraits,” Brache wrote for Playboy about her Stratten images. “But the large-scale portraits in my Dorothy series perform two contradictory acts at once: they monumentalize her forgotten image while simultaneously withholding it.”
