(all about an artist who celebrates male genitals and men sharing theirs with one another for fun and pleasure, whose work I will be discussing in street language, so this posting is totally not for kids or the sexually modest — though to satisfy WordPress’s strictures, there are, alas, no genitals displayed for open view)
The artist is the beefcakemeister Kent Neffendorf, who came to me this morning in this painting on Pinterest:
(#1) KN’s “The sailor who fell from grade with the sea” (one of his, um, Seafood artworks, featuring sailors good enough to eat; and with a jokey title playing on a Yukio Mishima title); a complex painting with attention to a great many details, but with two focal areas, the sailor’s face (this turns out to be the artist’s own face) and the rock-hard dick in his pants (made more noticeable by the pointing finger of the sailor’s right hand, holding a cigarette but aimed in parallel to his dick)
Two things about KN as an artist. The first thing is that he’s technically highly skilled, and attends to details. Look at #1: that’s a fine portrait, evocative of the disheveled sailor’s character; the details of the wall behind him are realistic and a bit shabby; the folds of his worn uniform are lovingly done; the pieces of furniture are arrayed in an abstract pattern surrounding his crotch; and the four items of visual display make an open semicircle surrounding the sailor’s whole body (more on the four items below).
The second thing is that KN is totally into dick (for a KN painting, #1 is extraordinarily modest on the phallic front; a large part of his output is jam-packed with hard-ons in happy display). The obvious comparison is to Tom of Finland; KN recognizes the relationship and has done homages to ToF, as here:
(#2)
Both artists depict worlds of men, all of them ever-ready for sex — Forever Tumescent is the motto — and on the lookout for similarly disposed men. ToF’s men are hypersexual, with outsized cocks and balls and huge muscular asses; they’re also inclined to be frenetic, displaying some of ToF’s own compulsive desire for sex with other men. KN’s men, in contrast, are just very large ordinary guys (the one on the right in #2 is as big as KN’s guys get, in honor of ToF); and they’re just enthusiastic about cocksucking and fucking, not obsessively needy. It’s a different feel.
KN’s range of subjects and presentations of them is also much wider than ToF’s. The sailor in #1 is on the prowl for sex, with a hard-on that won’t go away, and he’s weary, rumpled, and sweaty, but he’s a man who wants men and he’s offering to give what he’s got and to take what you’ve got. A bit on the earthy side at this point, but a nice guy. He’s unexpectedly complex for a sailor who looks like he’s about to come in his pants; he probably has a wry sense of humor, has shipped out to interesting places, so the two of you can talk pleasantly in the afterglow. Definitely worth a shot.
As for the self-portrait, here’s a thumbnail head shot of KN (born in 1959, studied painting at Parsons in NYC, now based in Los Angeles):
(#3) Gazing right into our eyes, rather that up into another man’s as in #1
The semicircle of visual art. KN has taken four items of visual messaging and washed their colors to a muddy red to go along with the muddy green paint on the wall, to produce a surround for the man-hungry sailor; from the upper left corner:
— an “I Am A Man” poster: originally designed for the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike in February 1968, then used during the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington DC during the summer of 1968
— a cover for the Marguerite Duras novel The Sailor from Gibraltar (originally published in French in 1952), in which
a woman searches for the nameless sailor — a crook and a killer — who awakened in her an insatiable taste for love (Internet Archive)
— a Canadian Navy recruitment poster “The Navy Wants Men” [I was hoping for a J.C. Leyendecker recruitment poster for the US Navy, but you can’t get everything you want]
— the cover of an issue of the gay beefcake rag Blueboy (1974-2007)
I suppose there’s still more to be mined in #1, though I hope to have convinced you that it’s dense with content and carefully composed, worth putting in some time on.
The artist and his work. KN on the Saatchi Art site:
I paint figures and landscapes in oil and acrylic ink & pencil [AZ: the pencil sketches are often elegant and textured]. I’m interested in celebrating the art of the pinup [AZ: for Saatchi, he says pinup; I say beefcake] and portraiture in constantly evolving ways. I like to tell a story and create mystery in my work.
And on his own website:
He has exhibited at Leslie Lohman Museum in New York and Tom of Finland in Los Angeles and is part of their permanent collections. His paintings are collected internationally and have appeared in the publications Men, Mandate, Freshmen, Playgirl, Honcho, In Touch, Blueboy, the Advocate and novels by Felice Picano and Gordon Merrick.
Two more examples. First, a portrait, against a background of white flowers:
(#4) With Snow White’s dick in some Calvin Klein tighty-whities
KN commands a range of styles. Here the central figure is both glossier and less detailed than the earlier examples. Stylistic choices carried still further in the final example, which also has the figures without background, in a land of no context, just the fucking, man (and the kissing):
(#5) Smaller and darker fucks larger and lighter, doing Standing Missionary (which needs a platform)
Everything simplified to a cartoon. A caption, dude, we need a caption!
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