Boy Bordello and Dirty Little Drawings

The Leslie Lohman Gallery is exhibiting drawings of the male nude, done by participants of the Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop, in a wide range of styles and media. A friend, Kevin Maxwell, is also exhibiting.



According to Kevin, in the drawing sessions, models posed in various positions for increasing lengths of time. The first pose, taking off the shirt, was held for five minutes. The brevity of that pose explained why drawings of that position tended to be sketchier and less colored in, qualities that worked to great effect in some drawings. These drawings were tender, innocent or fleeting. Kevin’s Otisno (the one in upright purple frame in the corner) had a look of tender concentration on his face as he lifted a side of his tank-top.



The last pose, lying back and jerking off, was held for twenty minutes. Kevin said that artists worked furiously to get the pose down on paper but simultaneously kept an eye out for the model’s climax. When he came, the room usually burst out in applause. Sometimes, a model would decline to come. One such model told Kevin, when they went out for drinks, that he wanted to keep something for himself, having exposed everything else.



I discovered at the exhibition that a friend posed for these artists. I was not surprised because he has the muscled bulk typical of all the models, and because he has an exhibitionist streak (as have I). I think he was one of only two Asian models drawn and exhibited. Was it my paranoia or was it true that the few drawings of him erased his Chinese ethnicity? Many drawings of non-whites played up their ethnicity (hair, facial features, skin tone), but the drawings of my friend focused on his body which could be any muscular dude’s body. The models of color were also recognizable by their names, for instance, Gonzalo. My friend, who has a Christian name, could not be recognized that way either.



Kevin had the distinction of drawing the most number of kisses of any artists in the exhibition. One small picture zoomed in on two locked heads, affording little background space to the intensity of the facial embrace.

Other works I liked:

Brian Coape-Arnold
Gonzalo, acrylic and oil pastel on paper
Gonzalo and Bobby, acrylic and oil pastel on paper

John Kirslis
Gonzalo, mixed media on paper
Gonzalo (standing) and Bobby, mixed media on paper

Steven Frim
Craig, watercolor and pencil on paper

Frank Barrett
Brian K, mixed media on paper

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more