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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.
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'jacob wrestling with the angel' 24 x 30 acrylic
on canvas |
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'hiphop' 24x30 acylic on canvas |
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"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.
Ive 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 dont 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
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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.
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''boyblue'
16 x 20 acrylic on canvas |
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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.
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'debriefing'
16 x 20 acrylic on canvas |
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my preferred way to see any guy - getting naked :-) unfortunately,
the industrial military complex has a different agenda when stripping
guys down. |
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'first
love' 16 x 20 acrylic on canvas |
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back to a time of innocence lost when youth and energy and inner-tensions
were finally released and the inner-world changed forever. to this
well we do well to return. |
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to put your mind even further back in time and to use every means
of positive association i can find, let me include here my personal
favorite of the paintings i've done so far this year, Saint Sebastian. |
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'saint sebastian' 16 x 20 acrylic on canvas
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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.
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