[Sexy guy. scarcely clothed, so not to everyone’s taste.]
Visual artists — at least those who think of themselves as Artists, creating fine art (for its own sake), in the art world — tend to be elusive folk: hiding behind pseudonyms, performing elaborate presentations of themselves, concealing biographical information in the belief that they should be judged on their art alone, producing accounts of what their art is about that are either bafflingly abstraction-laden or sophomorically jokey, giving their works unhelpful titles, making information about their works hard to come by, and so on. (In my experience, illustrators, cartoonists, and craft artists are considerably more approachable.)
Which brings me to the subject of my 3/27 posting “With hooves and horns” (assembled after considerable wrangling with sources), which looked at
the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager … Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images …, male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples …. Also to self-portraits of many kinds; well, he’s a good-looking hunky young man who can do pensive or flagrantly sexy, as it suits him. Here’s a sexy one: boots, buttocks, and profile. ..:
(#1) Self-portrait in jockstrap and boots (not dated)
The painting shows a young man I judge to be in his 30s. Meanwhile, the young man categorization comes from Yeager writing about himself in the Advocate magazine website on 2/16/21 — only three years ago — in “Spring Brings Hooves and Horns From Todd Yeager”:
Todd is a working artist in New York City who has been exhibiting in galleries for a surprising number of years considering what a young man he is.
But then the age thing started to unravel.
First, in the works reproduced in the Advocate piece was another self-portrait (dated as from 2020) that I hadn’t properly studied. But this looks like a significantly older man:
(#2) TY by TY, again pensive, now with decidedly Romantic hair
Then, accompanying a 9/5/23 YouTube video on TY’s art, this information about the artist, from the Yeager Museum site (which has been temporarily unavailable for a while now):
I currently live in New York City. I am a professional working artist who has been selling portraits since the age of 12. I was born in the 60s and graduated from high school in the 80s. I sold my work at a gallery in Washington, DC for many years, but more recently my work has sold at the Leslie + Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art here in New York, as well as in private and public shows and on this website. The artwork included on this [site] ranges from my large scale detailed paintings to sketches, studies, portraits, self portraits, and nudes. Fortunately I grew up close to cities where I could visit some of the worlds greatest art museums. I have many interests with my art but my main focus is pretty much on people. Though some of my work is conceptual I will do a picture just for [its] beauty, and nothing is more beautiful to me than the human form. I am a fan of much artwork which would not be considered conventionally beautiful, however I find many different kinds of unusual people to be fascinating subjects. I hope you enjoy the artwork. I’ve included some descriptions of the inspiration behind different works.
Ok, fuzzy on the specifics. But born in the 1960s means that now in the 2020s he’s around 60. Not imaginably a young man.
Selling portraits since the age of 12, perhaps, but his first published book was apparently Rascals: Erotic Fantasies of Todd Yeager, published by Bruno Gmünder in 2008 (when TY would have been around 40. The cover of the volume:
(#3) Yet another self-portrait, with boots but without a jockstrap; this one’s right up against the X-rated line, but others in the volume go way over it
Portraits of Dorian Todd Yeager. Portraits of TY ‘portraits by TY’, like the portraits of John Singer Sargent. Portraits of TY ‘portraits depicting TY’, like the portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. The preposition of in English is wonderfully versatile (or annoyingly so, depending on your point of view). #1 and #3 are self-portraits of TY, portraits of him in both senses at once: portraits of TY of TY.
And then if you look at a lot of them, TY’s self-portraits sometimes appear to be getting younger as he ages, in the fashion of Dorian Gray. Possibly because of the difficulty in dating the portraits; but more likely because some of the portraits are retrospective or were flatteringly improved.
Lives. I have an enduring interest in lives — the history of people’s lives, the way they live their lives now. Elusive artists who reveal so little of these details, artists like TY, who tells us he was born in the 60s and graduated from high school in the 80s, someplace in the US near big cities, they frustrate me.
I’m interested in the course of artists’ lives and in how their days unfold. I’m also interested in the course of lgbt people’s lives and in how they structure the days. But I don’t get much on TY.
April 4, 2024 at 6:25 am |
I thought the phrase “a surprising number of years considering what a young man he is” might have been somewhat tongue-in-cheek, rather than a real attempt to pretend to be younger than he actually is.
April 4, 2024 at 6:34 am |
Irony is often hard to detect, but I read TY’s comment in the light of his having said that he sold works from the age of 12 on.