What a community!

The picture that opens this post earned the following response from Tumblr when, following the lead of Face Book, they banned "Adult Content". 

This post was flagged because it contains adult content that violates our Community Guidelines. It has been reviewed by one of our trained experts and cannot be appealed.

The relevant Tumblr guideline reads as follows:

Banned content includes photos, videos, and GIFs of human genitalia, female-presenting nipples, and any media involving sex acts, including illustrations. The exceptions include nude classical statues and political protests that feature nudity. The new guidelines exclude text, so erotica remains permitted. Illustrations and art that feature nudity are still okay — so long as sex acts aren’t depicted — and so are breastfeeding and after-birth photos.

Whilst my clay sketch of the reclining figure is not a "classical nude statue" it nevertheless qualifies as "art". Tumblr's ban went into effect in December 2018. Since that date they may have re-trained their experts for when I re-submitted the picture a few weeks ago it sneaked through. Thank goodness that the Blogger Community has a more mature approach to nudity.

Below, without fear of being flagged, is one of three paintings from yesterday's painting session with Collean. 

Without shame or wantonness

"A girl stood before him in midstream...her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's...her thighs, fuller and soft hued as ivory were bared almost to the hips...She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes, her eyes turned to him in quite sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness.

The above passage from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" By James Joyce (1882-1941) reminded me of a similar experience of my own from almost fifty years ago.

Safely at anchor after five solitary weeks at sea, I dived overboard. The warm tropical sea caressed every inch of my body and with leisurely stokes I swam towards a beach where four girls in their late teens were laughing and splashing in shallow water. Oblivious to my presence, they playfully wrestled and grabbed at the ties of each other’s bikinis. As they struggled I caught glimpses of dark areolas and the beguiling contours of their pudendas. Three of the girls waded ashore and the girl that remained told her friends that she’d follow after rinsing the sand out of her bikini. They shouted back, “White man will see your pussy.” Unabashed she replied, “See if I care!”

I watched as my solitary Venus bared her breasts and deftly stepped out of her bikini. She flung the flimsy triangles over her shoulder and nonchalantly washed the grains of sand from her body. There was no trace of shyness or shame, only innocent delight in the wonder of her sexuality.

If only more people could accept the beauty of the nude and our sexuality without shame or wantonness.

The sketches below are from hundreds that I made on Caribbean beaches in the 1970's and 1980's.

  

After I'm Gone

As with many artists that received limited recognition in their lifetime, I consider the chance - slender though it may be - that it could come along after my death.

For this reason I am reluctant to part with the hundreds of paintings in my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun. The paintings span a period of over thirty years and they form a single entity. Very few have suffered what the artist James Whistler described as the indignity of being sold.

I can count on my hand the number of artists, past and present, who have allowed watercolour the freedom to suggest the beauty of the female form. I stress freedom as against as against contrived restraint. My method of working direct and rapidly from the model is unpredictable. A painting that I might perceive as a failure nevertheless contains an element of truth. Today’s painting is a case in point.

One reason for my book Notes on the Nude is that after I am gone, I can still have a say as to what my work has been all about. I hope that my models will also have their say, as they have done in the closing pages of my book. They have shared my struggles and celebrated our occasional success. I would much sooner that my models have their say rather than some art academic that wouldn't know a painting if one fell on his - or more likely her - head. 

A Woman Undressing

A Woman Undressing

Egon Schiele (1890-1918)

A woman undressing is like the sun breaking through the clouds. (Auguste Rodin 1840-1917)

Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele all worked around the theme of a woman undressing. My own contribution to undressing as against undressed, is limited to these sketches from ten years ago.

At a pinch, this more recent watercolour from my book Notes on the Nude may also qualify.

I wouldn't give tuppence for it

The first picture is from a recent experiment in paper making. On a left-over batch of cotton rag pulp I threw some petals and slender strands of stamen. The surround is a paper made from banana stems. Nine out of ten visitors to my studio are attracted to it.

The second picture is one of the hundreds of studies that I have painted for my series Daughters of the Caribbean Sun. It does not adhere to the common concept of beauty. Nine out of ten visitors to my studio wouldn't give tuppence for it. 

I am not the first painter to be out of tune with the perceptions of the public at large. Towards the end of his lifetime's work Michelangelo declared that he'd have been better off selling matches. 

Likewise, the landscape painter John Constable wrote: 

There is no finish in nature. My art flatters nobody by imitation; it courts nobody by smoothness and tickles nobody by petiteness...how then can I hope to be popular!