Read my final essay of my BFA Fine Art course, contextualising my art practice.
Sexuality and Desire: Artistic, Personal and Social Exploration
‘Erotic art expresses the demand for sexual freedom - a freedom vital to individual happiness and mental well-being. In that sense, erotic art carries a truly revolutionary message: it demands no less than extension of freedom, not only in the sexual area, but in every sphere of social life.’
Within my art practice I have many layers of influence and inspiration. What I hope to create in my artwork is ambiguity in the form of a breakdown in gender roles and sexuality within sex, alongside a visually pleasurable experience from the visceral quality of the materials and images I use. With the experience of sex as my subject matter, I want to use it as an opportunity for self-reflection; by uncovering and making sense of my own sexuality and desires.
The topic of sex as subject matter in art has made me think about how to represent the passion and sexual charge, and how to present the body, physically transformed as a result of the passion and pleasures of sex. I have approached my painting and sculpture with the same set of challenges, creating a crossover of how image and material can evoke an emotive reaction. In painting I work from a range of images of sex, some from a first person perspective, others more voyeuristic, and the paint is of a very fluid consistency with a lot of medium. This allows me to work quickly and create expressive brush marks.
When making my ceramic and clay pieces, I physically wrestle with the clay to shift and twist it, creating very visible finger holes and movement under my hands. I want the finished object to look as though it is moving within itself, something that hints towards a bodily resemblance.
My painting
My sculpture
During the development of my art practice, I have been looking at artists who deal with the body and flesh as their subject matter. Artists whose work touches on the themes of desire and sex. When working with sex as a subject matter, and images depicting sex, I feel I should address and acknowledge the pornographic, and where my work sits in relation to it. The imagery I use in my paintings and drawings questions the differences in viewpoints when depicting sex, and how that affects the experience the viewer has. Roger Scruton makes a distinction between what is pornographic and what is ‘genuinely’ erotic by the viewpoints presented; pornographic works have a voyeuristic approach, with the viewer having a ‘keyhole’ perspective, whereas erotic work ‘invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter’.
Lynda Nead writes an interesting observation on the line that erotic art toes, in relation to pornography;
‘Since pornography may be defined as any visual representation that achieves a certain degree of sexual explicitness, art has to be protected from being engulfed by pornography, in order to maintain its position as the opposing term to pornography. The erotic plays a critical role within this system; it is the borderline of respectability and non-respectability, between pure and impure desire.’
I feel Nead’s observation highlights the position in which I want my art practice to sit, exploring and challenging the boundaries of what is considered visually attractive or repulsive.
Another aspect I have considered when making both my paintings and ceramic sculptures, is the transition of energy from me into the work - whether it be through a pencil, paintbrush, or my hands in clay. There is a physical connection with the material that I can relate to the body contact experienced in sex. I want this energy to take on a life within the work and to express something emotionally heightened, dramatic, to the viewer.
The sensation of touch can be applied literally to my use of clay and physical handling of it to make my ceramic sculptures. I have looked at Auguste Rodin’s work for how to create a visually dynamic object that holds a lot of sexual energy.
Rodin’s sculptures bear the marks his hands made, the emphasis of his touch brings associations to the sexual.
‘Rodin’s sculptures increasingly bore the material evidence of his making... These strategies served to amplify the subject matter of passion and sex that Rodin pursued as a means to animate the bodies he sculpted and to engage the viewer viscerally’.
The current exhibition at Ordovas Gallery, ‘Movement and Gravity: Bacon and Rodin in dialogue’ explores Rodin’s influence in Francis Bacon’s work. It was interesting for me to see how Bacon responded to Rodin’s skillful use of to body to depict movement in space. In his painting Lying Figure, 1959, I was able to see the direct influence of Rodin’s sculpture Iris, in the position of the reclined nude with genitals exposed.
Auguste Rodin Francis Bacon
I looked at Bacon’s works more closely after visiting the exhibition, I became interested in his distortion of the figure with the ability to convey something sexual in it’s energy. With reference to the qualities of oil paints, Bacon recognised they could communicate through sensation rather than narrative;
‘Some paint comes across directly onto the nervous system, other paint tells you the story in a long diatribe through the brain’.
Bacon’s interest in the visceral led me to look at his wrestling resource imagery, particularly the contact sheets of photos he had where two men grapple in what can be interpreted as both a sexual encounter and one to inflict pain. This is the kind of imagery I enjoy working from; the loss of ability to distinguish one body from another, limbs entangled and disembodied. The grey area where a passionate sexual embrace crosses over into a violent physical struggle.
The presence of lovers as inspirations, models, and muses in artworks is deeply integrated within art history, and I take interest particularly in women who, as a result of fulfilling sexual relationships, experienced an ‘awakening’ in their creativity. In ‘Vagina: A New Biography’, Naomi Wolf discusses the importance of the neural connection between the female sex organs and the brain, on women’s well-being and creativity. She observes, in several examples, female writers and artists experiencing ‘a flowing of creative insight and vision following a sexual flowering’, such as writer George Eliot, who wrote Scenes of Clerical Life after an ‘illicit relationship’ with lover George Lewes. Another example she gives is the development of Georgia O’Keeffe’s experimentation in her flower paintings, after a ‘highly erotic’ relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz.
The reason for my research into the connection between the artist’s sexuality and their creative output lies within my own recent experiences. I am in the process of exploring and accepting my own sexuality and desires, which has led me to explore my connection to sex and how that can shape and progress in the work I make.
Cecily Brown’s erotic paintings explore movement and drama by focussing on figures having sex. Much like Bacon’s connection to paint, she used oil paint as a literal way to depict fleshiness and convey penetration. ‘How do you have a dramatic situation with nude figures? I mean, I didn’t want them to be killing each other, so they ended up err...fucking.’
The build up of the image and the paint creates something which transcends the sexual imagery, the works carry a sexual charge and energy of their own and become something you can’t take your eyes off of.
Looking at Brown’s work has helped me to develop formal aspects of my work such as exploring painting mediums to get the right thickness and consistency of paint to work with.
My paintings aren’t as heavily built up on the surface of the canvas as Brown’s paintings, I work quickly in large, fluid brushstrokes. I want the marks to have a loss of hierarchy, the form and the background become one flat surface, adding to the image’s ambiguity.
‘In the visual arts, ambiguity is an effect of representational processes, a complication, a blurring, an uncertainty or vagueness. It may be consciously intended, or it may occur as an accident or mistake... ambiguity can occur in the mind or body of the artist, or in the way the artist is positioned as a ‘subject’ in discourse. It can be found in the artwork or in the spectator, in public or in private space, or in the relationship between the art and its historical context.’
In the development of my image-building language, I have learned the importance of the fluid line. Drawing is the foundation for both my paintings and sculptures, I take great interest in the development of drawing as a key component in my work. The aesthetic of the contrast between the surface and the drawn line is something I began to investigate after seeing the Picasso Prints exhibition in the Vollard Suite at The British Museum. The etchings presented Picasso’s responses to classical sculpture and brutal passion, portrayed through the image of a Minotaur. I can draw a relationship between Bacon’s wrestling resource images and Picasso’s monstrous, merged bodies in that they are very simplistic visually, yet evoke a variety of energies, from post-coital euphoria through to carnal, violent passion.
My charcoal study
Picasso
The ambiguity of Picasso’s minotaur etchings led me to explore abjection and I am interested in how it sits in art. Julia Kristeva defines abjection as something that ‘disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.’
However, Alyce Mahon goes further to describe the abject as ‘wonderfully intimate, it is where intimate suffering and loss can also join intimate sexual desire and excess’. In the context of art, Mahon describes the abject as able to reveal a ‘peculiar mix of disgust and intimacy as artists seize the materiality of the erotic, sexually active body... as a medium and theme in itself.’
The absence of a clear repulsion or violence in my work means that the topic of abjection cannot yet be fully applied to my practice. I take great interest in the potential boundaries my work could push in terms of shifting between sexual pleasure and sexual violence. At the moment I feel my work explores the formal, visual boundaries of material and painting, creating a discourse through the breakdown of an image and its background, or a sculptural form and its appearance.
Through exploring and researching a subject as broad as sex and desire, I have found inspiration and influence that can lead my art practice into further development. The subject matter and research within my practice has created avenues from which I can explore and play, while establishing my process and developing a professional career in life after my degree studies. It has also led me to areas of art theory that I have yet to fully explore, such as Feminist art movements and their influences on contemporary practice. I also want to go further with the depiction of sex in my work, starting by broadening my resource imagery - sexual activities exist on an incredibly wide and varied spectrum, I feel it would be interesting to make representations of some of the many types of sex people engage in, and to look at artists who have covered this topic in their practice.
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