Archive for the ‘Male art’ Category

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“A place for us to see each other”

May 12, 2024

(Some photos of male bodies and allusions to sex between men, but no naughty bits and no street language — just not to everyone’s taste)

The end tag to a New York Times story, “At Frieze, Photographer of Gay Life Seeks ‘a Place in the Sunshine’: Stanley Stellar has documented gay New York, on the streets and in his studio, for decades. Now he steps onto his biggest stage”, by Erik Piepenburg, on-line on the NYT website on 5/3 (in print on 5/4); from the story:

From May 1-5 [AZ: yes, the event is now over; my life has been difficult, and I’m doing the best that I can], Stellar will step onto possibly his biggest stage when Kapp Kapp, the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery run by the twin brothers Sam and Daniel Kapp, shows his work at Frieze New York, the annual international art fair that returns to the Shed at Hudson Yards.

On view will be 15 of Stellar’s “Piers” photographs: assertive portraits and lazy-day snapshots of the mostly gay men who claimed the decrepit West Side piers as social and sexual turf in the 1970s and ’80s. Many photographs will be shown in color for the first time; “Stanley Stellar: The Piers,” a related book of photos, has been reprinted timed to the fair.


(#1) “Piers Roof July 1, 1978”

(more…)

Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography | Leave a Comment »

The gay handshake

May 11, 2024

(It’s about men going down on men, in street language, so not for kids or the sexually modest)

A subtopic extracted from a posting (in preparation) on Stanley Stellar’s career in male photography (previous posting on this blog: on 5/8 in “Stanley Stellar’s couch”), during which he has amassed a trove of tens of thousands of photos, almost all set in NYC (and is still at it). One part of his work is devoted to depicting the beauty of the male body; for this he solicits men to pose for him (that’s why his e-mail address is on his website). These men are of various sexualities.

The remainder of his work he thinks of photographing the gay community:

— chronicling Pride parades (in all their complexity)

— showing street life in gay neighborhoods and at locations of gay sociability — both places populated by an assortment of lgbt+ people, plus some others

— and recording the places of cruising and tricking for men who have sex with men: what I’ve called the subterranean world of sex between men in public

This subterranean world: cruising spots in public parks, the famous trucks in NYC’s West Village back in the day, gay baths and sex clubs, t-rooms (mensrooms repurposed for sex between men), and so on — including Stellar’s special province, the West Side piers in NYC. All places where sex between men (especially cocksucking, which is quick and easy, and requires no special preparation or clean-up, so can be smoothly managed pretty much anywhere) is available in spaces that are in some sense public and are open to other like-minded men but are carefully concealed from outsiders (hence, subterranean).

(more…)

Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and society, Language and the body, Language of sex, Male art, Photography, Social interactions | Leave a Comment »

Stanley Stellar’s couch

May 8, 2024

This is a reposting, on this blog, of the complete content of a 5/2/11 AZBlogX posting “Stanley Stellar’s couch”, original link:

http://arnold-x-zwicky.livejournal.com/29466.html

The 2011 posting includes a link (still valid) to Stellar’s own website, which is packed with wonderful content and kept up to date, and even includes his gmail address, so that he can make himself available to men interested in being photographed by him.

Today’s blast from the past is relevant to the current moment: the 2024 edition of the international art show Frieze New York (May 1-5, 2024) included 15 historic photographs by Stellar reproduced for the first time  in color. As reported in the 5/4 New York Times:

Titled “The Piers: In Color,” the queer-centered TriBeCa gallery Kapp Kapp presented Stellar’s Kodachrome vision of New York City’s west side piers of the late 70s through 80s, a pre-AIDS paradise mostly remembered in black and white. Stellar’s color photographs recall a vibrancy and texture often omitted from visual history.

More Stellar in a posting to come. In this one it’s just the couch.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Male art, Photography | Leave a Comment »

Pizza boy moments

May 6, 2024

From Susan Fischer on Facebook today, a link to a very old (11/30/11) Dale Coverly Speed Bump cartoon depicting the Trojan Pizza Boy:


(#1) Pizza Boy wears a cap, and he comes bearing two pizza cartons (plus, we assume, a lot of concealed Trojan warriors)

(more…)

Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and food, Language and sexuality, Language and society, Linguistics in the comics, Male art, Masculinity, Myths | 2 Comments »

Jason Lloyd’s cartoon gay world

May 4, 2024

(or maybe his gay cartoon world. either way, this posting gets right into men’s bodies and sex between men, in plain talk, so it’s totally not for kids or the sexually modest)

Encountered on Pinterest some time ago, an item from the Jason Lloyd Art website, with a work much like this one, two men in the act (but without a visible penis, so I can show it to you here):


(#1) “Just Relax” — I think Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s 1983 hit song is an inevitable association here — is about taking pleasure in getting fucked, and it’s in JL’s least cartoonish and most realistic (but soft-focus) style, which can be either simply erotic (and touching) or actually pornographic (and arousing), depending on how you approach it

All of JL’s work is at least somewhat simplified in its lines, and most of it is straightforwardly cartooning, all of it skilled, some of it notable.

(more…)

Posted in Captions, Cartoonists, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Language of sex, Linguistics in the comics, Male art | 2 Comments »

Andrew Salgado

April 28, 2024

Coming past me on Pinterest yesterday morning, some really impressive portrait paintings with abstractionist interventions, along the lines of the one below, the left panel of two:


(#1) Andrew Salgado, The Painter’s Apprentice (2014)

Unlike many of the artists I’ve posted about on this blog, AS and his personal and artistic histories are widely available to the public; there’s a Wikipedia page, tons of stuff on his website, and plenty of open (in fact blunt and unapologetically opinionated) interviews that are both informative and thought-provoking. You don’t have to wonder about his childhood — he talks about growing up in Regina, Saskatchewan with enormous affection — or how his personal life, as, as he puts it, a “young gay white guy” with a longtime male partner, living a new life in working-class London, and so on, plays out in his work — he’s happy to reflect on all the stages he’s been through in ten years, and on being an artist as a business, an enterprise that requires planning and salesmanship.

So: not only are masculinity, sexuality, and social identity recurrent themes in his art, they’re also prominent aspects of his presentation of self: as a guy guy, offhandedly but also defiantly queer (like, don’t fuck with me, dude, or you’ll be sorry), and simultaneously working-class, practically minded, playfully imaginative, and genuinely erudite.

AS came to me as paintings I’d never seen before but was bowled over by, paintings with no context at all. I’ve already given you a lot of context, so I’ll jump right in with more paintings, recent ones (in many ways unlike the early painting in #1, and strikingly unlike this year’s work so far, mixed-media depictions of flowers — floral atlases crossed with Georgia O’Keeffe and Robert Mapplethorpe). Then to biography and art criticism.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Books, Gender and sexuality, Homosexuality, Language and plants, Male art, Masculinity, Music, Signs and symbols | 2 Comments »

With hooves and horns

March 27, 2024

(Male bodies, one full frontal, allusions to sex between men — not suitable for kids or the sexually modest.)

On the male art of the young NYC artist Todd Yeager (recently encountered in Pinterest, though his drawings have been featured in Advocate magazine several times). Especially devoted to faun / satyr / goat-god Pan images (you can pretty much smell the sex on them), male buttocks and penises, and loving male couples (and to chronicling his domestic life and the street life of NYC). 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 (really big boots):


(#1) Self-portrait With Boots and Jock

(more…)

Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and animals, Language and the body, Male art, Myths | 1 Comment »

The Hot Days of Christmas, days 2 – 4

January 3, 2024

I have this digital-artist friend (on the other side of the country) who proposed to give me a Christmas gift: daily cards (delivered by the USPS) for the AI Hot Hunk Days of Christmas (with Hot understood as HomoHot ‘arousing to homos’); the (very sweet) idea was to arouse me on a daily basis with a surprise hot guy, one for each of the 12 days from Christmas to Epiphany Eve, as in the song. Mail delivery this Christmas season has been — let me put this in a kindly fashion — erratic. The  day 1 card arrived on day 4, not an unreasonable journey across the country, but then nothing, nothing at all, through to day 8 (8 maids a-milking, New Year’s Day), when the artist and I began to fear that the cards had gone astray, been seized by the post office, whatever, so that I anxiously awaited yesterday’s (day 9) mail. Which brought me days 2 through 4, whew.

By then, the artist had supplied me (by e-mail) with an X-rated version of day 5  (which their printers had rejected as too raunchy) and also its steamy but non-X substitute. So today (day 10) I’m hoping for the day 6 card. And then on from there. Meanwhile, I’ll improve the hours until the mail comes by showing you days 2 through 4.

Along the way, the artist compressed the AI Hot Hunk Days of Christmas to the Hot Days of Christmas, which I think is a stroke of abbreviatory genius, and hereby adopt for my postings from now on.

(more…)

Posted in Art, French, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and the body, Male art, Music, My life, Puns | Leave a Comment »

The AI Hot Hunk Twelve Days of Christmas

January 1, 2024

🐇 🐇 🐇 RABBIT RABBIT RABBIT to inaugurate the month of January, in screaming caps to inaugurate the new year; it’s also Holy Dick Day, or (in more conventionally churchly terms) the Circumcision of Christ; and the 8th day of Christmas (warning: the 5th day of Christmas will bring us to significant penis-talk, which is not to everyone’s taste)

This is a tale of massively failed communications. It begins with my posting yesterday “The 7th day of Christmas”:

That would be today, December 31st, New Year’s Eve. … Back on the 4th day, December 28th, my mail brought me a digital-art celebration of the 1st day [by one of] my digital-artist friends. For the occasion, a partridge of sorts in a pear tree of sorts, and … starring a fabulously hot object of gay sexual desire.

(#1)

… All three components … have that air of hyper-reality that I find especially desirable in digital compositions; not trompe-l’oeil, but a kind of magic realism.

… [about the peculiar partridge,] I have inquired of the artist, but they haven’t risen to the bait.

Ah, that’s where things started to go awry.

(more…)

Posted in Art, Facial expression, Holidays, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Male art, Music | 2 Comments »

Gorgeous

December 27, 2023

Gorgeous, sensuous men and glamorous, decadent women, in the drawings of Mel Odom (born 9/2/50), sampled recently on Pinterest (whose bots have divined some of my tastes) — but especially, men in the Odom brand of homomasculinity: queer, perverse, beautiful. Odom explicitly recognizes the erotic art of Aubrey Beardsley as an antecedent and counterposes his soft-edged homomasculinity to a harder-edged variety in homoerotic physique magazines, and, ultimately, in the hypermuscular, hypersexual drawings of ToF, sometimes characterizing himself as the anti-Tom of Finland.

I start with an Artforum April 2019 review by Alex Jovanovich of Odom’s “Gorgeous” solo exhibition at Daniel Cooney Fine Art (in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC), 1/10 to 2/23 in 2019:

(more…)

Posted in Art, Gay porn, Homosexuality, Male art | Leave a Comment »

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