I’ve always been one to draw myself startlingly naked. One of my dearest friends even likes to call me a peddler of self-pornography. I have massive communication issues, violent contradictions of thought swirling around (as we all do?). In fact, the more important something is to me the less likely I am to express it verbally. I am almost never naked in real life, literally or figuratively.
The nude art thing started when I began focusing on self portrait work as a teenager. I particularly enjoyed when the oil painting above was printed on the cover of the high school newspaper, and most of my peers improved upon it by adding the rest of my boobs in underneath the image. (I’m not being sarcastic, I fucking loved it)
The large conte crayon piece above was about 5 feet wide and full of scribbled stream of consciousness ramblings. My art teacher stuck a huge piece of paper to the wall and said “make something”… a classroom of distracted students stared as I created a cloud of scribblings and dust. I remember another girl incorporated the figures into one of her drawings, and I was so touched by that. Teachers and students commented that they liked my “realistic representation” of the female form, but I was just drawing myself. I’ve always been a bit soft around the middle, so my self portraits were not going to look like insect-waisted super heroes.
I fell into some difficult times and lost my nerve in my early 20s though, so the art got rather subdued. I stopped making personal expressive pieces almost entirely but continued doing portraits and murals and other commission work.
I drew the colorful selfie below when I fell in love with Sir Jeffery at age 25… and though the expressive outpouring didn’t start right away, it made a small crack (a butt pun!) in my self-built penitentiary walls.
I was advised to put it away by our real estate agent while people were walking through for showings on the house. Too late though, my inner nakie was rattling around looking for an escape route….
Unfortunately there were even more years of stumbling around being lost after that. I talked about the recent rebirth of my art in my “Why the Cyclops” post … the colored pencil piece below was my first outburst. A naked, colorful, outer space stream of consciousness scribble creature delight.
“Reborn” – colored pencil
I am working on another design right now which will be a completely digital painting – it contains imagery from dreams that keep following me throughout life. I’m naked in it, tummy rolls, birthmark and all. It is supposed to be me at my most powerful- facing the natural disasters that haunt my sleepy times.
I may not ever be able to verbally say much of any significance, but I am hoping that by continuing to be naked… literally and figuratively in my art, I can say something universal, powerful, connecting, and healing to the viewer. “We are all in this together, naked, except for our clothes… which we should probably keep on wearing…” never mind. 🙂
