the unclothed male is the pre-eminent subject of my artistic endeavours - this subject evokes tendernesss sadness longing ectasy and desire in me. In my approach you can see I like the expressionists and fauvists and would say I am most interested in how my art conveys feelings. I am constantly criticized for this by my art teacher who is heavily influnced by formalism and lives in fear of sentimentality in art. Nevertheless I persist with the use of colour and a free style to help me convey these transformative feelings. 2015. I am beginning to understand why my art teacher dislikes my male nudes so much Phillip Pearlstein quoted in The Naked Nude p90 Frances Borzello 2012 In 1962 “It seems madness on the part of any painter educated in the 20th-century modes of picture making to take as his subject the naked human figure ,conceived as a self-contained entity possessed of its own dignity, existing in an inhabitable space ; viewed form a single vantage point “ The nude is out of fashion in art circles but refuses to go away "No nude , however abstract , should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling , even though it be only the faintest shadow -and if it does not do so , it is bad art and false morals " Kenneth Clarke Is it just this vestigial eroticism that drives my work ? Is it enough just to capture extraordinary beauty of the male nude form or does one have to be self aware about capturing the nude image and comment on it in an innovative way for it to be acceptable as a fit subject for contemporary art? "Art can never exist without Naked Beauty display'd." William Blake Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages ; Auguste Rodin (French sculptor of bronze and marble figures, 1840-1917) "The male body was not mysterious, he had never thought about it at all, but it was the most impenetrable of mysteries now; and this wonder made him think of his own body,of its possibilities and its imminent and absolute decay, in a way that he had never thought of it before." James Baldwin, "Another Country" - 1962 The expression of the face balks account, But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. Walt Whitman The Body Electric Comments on the Unclothed Male "Love your art! One of the very few artists I have found that actually captures the essence of an artistic nude without it being soft porn." coment from a fellow deviant artist "even when they are posed your images always have a spontaneous and candid feeling about them...the connection between you and your model(s) is very real...it's like a couple of friends getting together and one odf them just happens to have a camera. You capture wonderful...serious...humourous...intimate moment and make amazing art from it." Hanging in there From Greek art, to Dolce & Gabbana advertising, the male nude has always been about sex. It's just that these days we don't try to hide it, writes Jonathan Jones * o o Share3 o reddit this * o Jonathan Jones o The Guardian, Saturday 11 March 2006 o Article history Centuries of European artists and art lovers depicted and looked at naked men in what was supposedly a disinterested and entirely cerebral way, as the embodiment of an athletic, spiritual and even political ideal. This purportedly had nothing to do with sex. But it is impossible for us to accept that nude images can be asexual, so it is impossible for us to take seriously this lost aesthetic. It would be so easy to "deconstruct" the tradition of the male nude by telling stories like this: in the British Museum, the Discus Thrower arcs in smooth motion, the quintessence of an athletic ideal worshipped by Victorian men who aspired to be physical specimens worthy to rule an empire - yet this pristine example of the classical body was, in reality, used by the emperor Hadrian as part of a personal homosexual cult. The deconstruction, however, is redundant. Such ironies never were lost on the artists and intellectuals who revived the Greek nude, again and again, across millennia - not on the Romans, nor on Renaissance artists, nor on Winckelmann, who died, it was said, in a homosexual encounter. How could anyone miss the reality of what Greek art was? Sex between men was endorsed by naked sports, all-male dinner parties and the comradeship of citizen armies. The Greek appetite for portraying the naked male body was a direct expression of a culture we would call homoerotic. The complexity comes when later Europeans emulate the Greek nude. The question is - why did they want to? Why did European artists, again and again, turn to the classical depiction of the male body that had reached its apogee in Athens and other Greek city states in the 5th century BC, not merely as one interesting artistic theme, but as the single most serious subject in art? It was because the Greeks turned the body into philosophy. Look at Greek depictions of the masculine figure and you soon see how regular, systematic and abstract they are: look at a nude torso painted on an Athenian vase, the black lines that define pectoral muscles with a crisp idealism. The same bold summary of the way a man's body should look - rather than any attempt to convey how a specific one looks - gives Greek statues a noble unreality. If you had to find a modern analogy for the oval definition of the groin in a statue by the 5th-century BC sculptor Polykleitos, it would not be any real body, but Action Man. This insistence on the true and permanent "ideal" body parallels the Greek philosophers and scientists, from Pythagoras to Plato, who sought the truth beyond visible appearances. The Canon of Polykleitos - a book in which he analyses the correct proportions of the body - is lost, but the belief in a set of ideal proportions for the head, torso and limbs of a man survived into the Renaissance in the writings of the Roman architectural theorist Vitruvius. In the 15th century, Leonardo da Vinci drew his famous diagram of "Vitruvian man", arms and legs spread in a star shape, revealing that he fits inside a geometrical figure: there is a secret geometry in the human design. Suddenly we can see, after all, what artists and art lovers in the past so revered about Greek statues and what they were talking about when they spoke of a classical ideal. They weren't just covering up unacknowledged desires. Leonardo's Vitruvian man does not strike us as erotic at all, but cosmological. The star shape the man assumes makes us see humanity on a mind-expanding, astral scale. The strain - and it has been highly productive - in depicting the nude comes when it is revived by cultures nothing like as relaxed about the male body as Greece had been. The Greeks were well aware of the potential dangers of nude art - but this worried them only when it came to portraying women nude. When Praxiteles sculpted a fully naked Aphrodite, it was a sensational event. Pliny the Elder reports that visitors to her shrine couldn't contain themselves, and the stains of one man's encounter with the statue could still be seen in his day. In Renaissance Italy, Plato's writings, in which male desire for men is a noble part of philosophical culture, were translated and revered, yet this was, nevertheless, a Christian society in which you could be burned for sodomy. Instead of making Renaissance artists timid before the male nude, the added frisson of sinfulness and punishment seemed to incite them. Excitement still hangs in the air, like a fierce perfume, around Donatello's David in the Bargello Museum, Florence. This was a revolutionary work when it was cast in bronze in the middle of the 15th century, and it lives to this day as a confounding image. David wears leg armour that sets off his nudity. His buttocks are emphasised. The bronze of an adolescent, hand on hip, huge sword in his hand, is mounted on marble and you walk right around him, painfully aware of the sensuality of the polished metal. The reason this is a far more troubling object - challenging you to account for your own response, whatever you think your sexuality is - has to do with style. Greek athletes are abstract. Donatello's David is vividly and unmistakably studied from a living model: instead of being regularised in Action Man contours, his body is supple and animated, a real body, from bellybutton to kneecaps. Donatello's nude stood in the courtyard of the Medici Palace, announcing the spectacular return of the nude to art after a millennium of Christian guilt. Its naturalism inaugurates a completely new cult of the nude that takes inspiration from the classical ideal yet is aggressively realistic. This earthiness gives the Renaissance nude a passionate charge. Italian Renaissance art, as was once said of Burt Lancaster, is neither homosexual nor heterosexual but sexual, period. And this hypersexuality is intensified by Christian fear. Renaissance nudes meet that fear with violence, as if punishing the male body to chastise the sin of looking at it: Saint Sebastian is a favourite - speared by arrows. And Christ crucified. In Caravaggio's Deposition in the Vatican, the naked flesh of Jesus is lowered into the tomb. The nude has become unheroic, pitiful, and human. In one of Steven Meisel's photographs for Dolce & Gabbana, a naked man lies on the floor as if hurled down. In fact, this nude is taken from Caravaggio's painting of the conversion of Saint Paul, in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, the saint thrown on to his back by the force of divine truth. In the Dolce & Gabbana ad, this image of anguish and revelation becomes more provocative than harrowing. The tensions that were so creative in Renaissance art fade. The modern urge to define and map sexuality, to make knowledge of sex specific and categorical in a way it simply was not for Donatello, may have made us happier. It has not made us more imaginative. The unresolved way in which previous centuries contemplated the male body produced (to quote Orson Welles in a different context) "Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance". What have we produced? The thong.