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You are rehearsed and removed and reticent and repulsive and retarded. These were the smears lobbied by e-mail at painter Sarah Ashley Longshore after the producer of The Learning Channel’s Pledged viewed her audition tape. Then he e-mailed the sobbing artist an hour later to tell her she won the part. Conceived as a female reality version of frat comedy Old School, Pledged is set to shoot episodes in a Buckhead, Ga., mansion decked out with Longshore’s paintings. The show airs this fall on TLC.

“It’s a group of older, wiser and wilder girls,” the artist says. “We’re going to do things for charity and party like a sorority.”

The irony is Longshore never went Greek, but you would probably choose her for the show, too. She is quick-witted and alternates between brutal honesty and sweet nonchalance. When she speaks, the word “madness” pops into every paragraph. Unapologetic for her brash self-taught style, Longshore paints emotional, arresting portraits faster than it takes to cook dinner for four. And that’s the way it has to be. She’s an Alice Neel for the ADD set.

Sarah Ashley Longshore with her paintings. She will be featured, along with her work, on TLC reality show Pledged.

“Getting it from my head to the canvas is so fast sometimes,” Longshore says. “But I’ve destroyed canvases. I’ve burned canvases. When it’s happening, it’s happening.”

She is also emphatically independent. After joining fine art galleries from New York to New Orleans in her 20s, the 30-year-old grew tired of surrendering 50% of her sales. Now she opens her Southdowns home to interested buyers and uses e-mail and a Web site to aggressively market her prolific output. The expressionist portraits run from late celebrities Audrey Hepburn and Kurt Cobain to pristine geishas and malevolent bunnies to friends who, more often than not, stare wide-eyed at how Longshore has pictured them.

These over-proportioned, boldly colored faces captivate the eye, but Longshore needs a few extra hands to count the double takes her living art pieces get. Placing nearly nude models covered hair-to-toe in swirls of liquid latex in the middle of an art exhibit is like putting a 1,000-pound elephant in the room. It’s going to turn some heads.

“They’re a pain to transport and touch up, and it’s so hot for the models, but it’s cool,” Longshore says. “It’s worth it to see the look on people’s faces. I have to tell them ‘Yes, they’re live people. No, that’s not a body suit. It’s paint.’”

A native of Montgomery, Ala., Longshore grew up in musical theater and took up graphic art as a way to deal emotionally with her parent’s divorce. She still paints by mood and recently designed a series of fleur-de-lis labels for Merlin Wines to be distributed in Louisiana and New York.