October 2006- 7 year itch

afterthought-

in writing of 'Brazil' i'm actually expanding a smaller area of my affection - Rio de Janeiro (with just a passing nod to Salvador, Porto Seguro, Sao Paulo and Santos). and even more i'm condensing Rio's nectar into an intoxicating perfume of genously endowed spaces tolerant of those who love to celebrate life and dance to loud music and mesh the heat and daily grind with the sea and sexuality. it's those special common places and those who people them with smiles, sometimes welcoming, sometimes dangerous yet always seductive, sometimes undependable and unremarkable and at other times outrageously beautiful and fun, that are to me the essence, the aquarela, of Brazil.

When I first went to Brazil in 2000, I never would have imagined being able to return every year. This past year was my seventh time there. Also impossible to imagine at the beginning of the millennium, would be the current situation of the USA. My lifelong optimism that somehow, even if not apparently so, things were getting better has been tested and failed. I do not feel whatever benefits might or might not be in the pipeline are worth the costs. The 'national interests' and 'living the good life' seem to me unjustifiably toxic to a peaceful world.

The time I've spent in Brazil gives me something my own country now cannot- the desire to be part of it. whether it's the fact it's summer there when it's winter here, or that you can ride the bus and walk the city in a Speedo, or that the food is still real food or that I feel free to be myself there - whatever it is my body longs for it. And that before I met and loved and am loved by the most wonderful guy I've ever known. So as strong as my roots are, and as ideal as is my living situation here in Carolina, without this Brazilian connection I don't know how I'd cope with my frustration with the political system and with myself for passively accepting things as they are. During these past seven years. the simple traveler's question 'where are you from' jars me to realize I'm not proud to be an American anymore. My apologetic humility is profound and sincere

My art and life is subversive to the political agenda of the Republican party and immoral according to the Christian Coalition and the Pope. It's a sore spot that they just won't let heal, a convenient scapegoat of a scab they keep scratching raw. Well, I try to make sure that the itch remains until the day its more than soothed by mainstream popular culture; I want it legally respected. As an American it's my Right and until America becomes America this rebelling art that I do, tame as it may be, gives me vitality and compensates for the emotional/sexual energy that Brazil (more than any other country I've known) so easily lets me express. And so the best is that my art helps me get back to Brazil. My roots are here in the Southeast , but Brazil has given me the certainty that the sun shines on love as pure and hot as once I dreamed it to exist and the moon silvers a lovers' sea. Shaken optomist I am, but very much alive and itching for more.

"Tom- I was working today on a new story (a Journal on the Tom of Finland Erotic Art Fair in LA ) for my website -
TomBianchi.com – and I was taken to your site through www.DelftBoys.com while researching another artist. I got totally (happily) lost in your wonderful work and wanted to send you a note to tell you how impressed I am. I expect to
spend a lot more time with it – and want to read more too.

I’ve always been a political animal and have been using my art to challenge our culture – as you do so well – with the
power and beauty of our erotic vision. In the years as an artist before I started doing my photographic work (I was a
painter/sculptor) -- I was a lawyer – and that life caused me to focus on our need to change the world by showing it
alternatives to its power paradigms. So I totally appreciate your feelings and thoughts about the state of America
today...

But I want to tell you that I don’t often see art that moves me as much as yours does. It gets me in the loins as well
as in the head. Years ago I wrote art criticism for ArtWeek while I was making art for largely corporate venues –
always interviewing the artists – and almost only writing about art I admired. It was a way of keeping me in touch
with the conversations that meant the most to me – conversations about encouragement of talent. Anyway – I like to cover other artists at my site in the public Journal sections – and want to write about you for that in the future.

Happy to have come upon your marvelous work today"

Tom Bianchi, October 16, 2006

seems we gay men do well to develop the ability to deal with being scorned. like a hot wave of hatred permeating the room, this heat can be used to forge strength, competence and perception. so although we're sometimes up against the wall, it's to remember that countless others have been there too; and then gone on and wowed the world.

to shake things up a bit, thought i'd do a blue background. it is ultramarine blue, one of the purest of blues, not on the green or the red side. the darks on the shadow side then could be put in with pthalo blue which is a dark blue/green. and the darks on the light side are thalo mixed with alizarin crimson, making it a dark muted purple, i.e. slightly warmer than purepthalo.

the flesh tones are complicated to explain, but the trick is to not get too light too quickly and minimize the color, letting the figure reveal itself step by step.

maybe all the news about some senator's emails to late teens is on my mind and i'm kind of of ironically observinging the fact this might bring about political change when hundreds of thousands innocent iraquis slaughtered doesn't seem to elicit the same condemnation in the moral majority.

'saint sebastian' 16 x 20 acrylic on canvas

…taken from www.wikepedia.com....
According to his 5th-century Acta, Sebastion was a soldier who enlisted in the Roman army around 283. Diocletian, unaware that he was a Christian, appointed him as a captain of the Praetorian Guard. By 286, Sebastian was reportedly known for having kindly treated Christian prisoners due for martyrdom. Diocletian reproached him for his supposed ingratitude and ordered him executed by the arrows of the Mauretanian archers. He survived, and according to legend was healed by St. Irene, the widow of St. Castulus. Upon regaining his health he returned to preach to Diocletian. Subsequently the emperor ordered Sebastian to be clubbed to death.

Sebastian has, over time, become a homoerotic icon. In Christian lore, Sebastian turned down the advances of Emperor Diocletian. Sebastian's status as a gay icon was first made explicit by Georges Eekhond in 1909, and the notion has recurred in literature. Oscar Wilde, for example, used the pseudonym of Sebastian in his declining years in Paris, while Yukio Mishima's fictional, but likely partially autobiographical, Confessions of a Mask describes the main character's homosexual awakening on viewing Reni's St. Sebastian and Tennessee Williams wrote the poem "San Sebastiano de Sodoma," which reviews both the gay and religious sides of Sebastian.

According to Brazilian anthropologist Luiz Mott, Saint Sebastian (in Portuguese, São Sebastião) is considered by many homosexuals, especially in Brazil's lower and marginalized classes, the Patron Saint Of Gays. Officially Saint Sebastian is the Patron Saint of The city of Rio De Janeiro. In the tradition of the Afro-Brazilian religious syncretism Saint Sebastian is often associated with Ogum, especially In the state of Bahia, in the northeast of the country.