you are not alone

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“Anxiety”

When I get a panic attack. My skin feels like it’s on fire. I get hot. A prickly sensation crashes upward from my feet to my head and back down again. My heart beats so fast that stop feeling it. On bad days, I see my vision grey out or darken at the edges. I feel unsteady, nauseous, as if I could fall over while puking at any moment. Suddenly a large room can feel too small. The only remedy at that point is fresh air.

I excuse myself. I pretend to walk calmly to a door. Fighting dizziness the entire time. I go outside. I get fresh air. I close my eyes and start breathing. “It’s not real” I tell myself. My body plays the cruelest tricks. For a moment I feel like I’m dying.

Then it’s over. Back to base level anxiety.

A dark place with something hard and painful hanging above me, which I may be too afraid to look up and face. It radiates. Whatever the thing is. Anxiety oozes out of it and colors my world dark red.

One day it fades. The next day it’s back.

this one is called the greatest dance.

yes it’s a nude rendering.

Everything i receive tells me to keep going. My loved ones and close people are confused.

Part of me understands. Unless sex is being sold. Nudity is a shock. It makes everyone uncomfortable. But it makes them really uncomfortable when a man is drawing it, because it makes people think I’m some kind of pervert.

I’m making the art i want to see.

There are two main reasons why the characters in my art are naked.

A woman is a placeholder for human. To me the woman is everybody. I don’t think the world needs more art with male bodies in it. Men of old’ felt that the male body was a stand in for all humans. And that’s why most early medical studies were only on men. But the bias persisted. Everyone can relate with a woman/female body. Both man and woman and in between.

Naked we come. Naked we leave. Clothes tell a story. The story of no clothes is to see the human as they are. Raw. I want my viewers to see the pure human. As presented. Being naked also lets people immediately see themselves in the character and project themselves on to the character in the artwork. Because my art is symbolic. Sometimes i make something for the fun of it. Most of the time Im trying to distill a version of the idea in its purest form. Clothes are identity. In my art. There is no identity. The figure is you. The figure is all of us. The figure is also me. It’s anybody. It’s everybody. It’s the people you don’t see.

It’s just the inspiration. I get visions. Ideas for artworks. Scenes. When I imagine them, when i see them. I don’t see clothes. I can make out the feeling or what the character is supposed to be doing, but never who they are. Never what they are wearing.

Red. We are all red. Regardless of ethnicity, all our blood is red. I think red is a good color that can represent a person. So in some pieces, depending on the context and my mind I’ll render characters in red or black.

Black. Black bodies. When i think about the suffering. The chaos. The soft moments. Sometimes I’d make the character black. The black female form, is still a placeholder for all humans to me, but i use it because i want people to see the black.

Other ideas and notes

No one wants to see a naked man. That said i do have a few ideas for some pieces in which a male figure is the center point of the art. I don’t see myself drawing many naked men. 🤣 So given tha

I wouldn’t paint myself naked.

The erotic has many uses.

I’m not afraid of being judged. People judge me already. “This old guy thinks he can draw naked women and call it art” I wouldn’t be the first. I wouldn’t be the last. I don’t know why we were chosen.

I try to avoid sexualizing my characters unless the sensuality of the character is part of the point. The human just exists.

When I first started I used to add too much detail. It looked graphic. Overtly sexual. I showed my wife and my sister the artwork. My sister said “oh look it’s a bum bum”. I immediately decided to redraw the buttocks to make it less sexual. I removed contours and crease lines until it just looked like a figure.

I generally don’t want people to focus on the wrong thing. Unless it’s the thing I want them to focus on. And in some cases like the art above, certain details like fat folds, contracted muscles on arms, made people too shocked that they missed the point and focused on how the character appeared. I decided then that I would try to be as neutral as I can unless sexuality was the message.(and even then).

It’s no secret that the female body has been sexualized. A topless man and a topless woman aren’t looked at the same way. My role is to walk the line between sexual symbol and human, I’m trying to push the forms as far as I can, so that it’s recognisable as a female but not adding any of the sexualising details which are common today.

That’s what I’ll say about that for now.