I recently finished a piece for a client that is titled "Lemon Glow". It is a piece that is depicting the client's wife lying in the bed. This is not the first one that I have done for him. "Belle Femme", which I talked about the process of painting with, is the first one that I completed for him as a personal series. They have a tradition where they take pictures of her posed on the bed during special occasions. I think this is a very unique way of theirs to show their love for each other. Her presenting herself vulnerably to him, and him being her adoring fan. When you talk to him and listen to him you know that their love is very genuine and you can see it in his eyes how much she means to him. These pieces are not a representation of just someone laying out in a bed nude. This is the presentation of a wife submitting and opening herself up to her husband. A presentation in itself of intimate love. It is also a reflection of my skills and something that I find pride in, due to the fact that the human body is not an easy feat to complete. There is color matching and proportions involved. Plus every person is different so if one thing is off, it is no longer that person and it has became someone new.
The first time that I completed a nude piece for him, I got back a lot of good feedback about the art. For the most part with this second piece, I had a really good feedback from it as well. However, there was a few statements, that made me realize, maybe I should talk about why nude artwork. One person said "paint some pants on her", another asked "why naked", and then another talked about the sin of Adam and Eve and recognizing their nudity. So this is my effort to discuss the importance of the nude art work.
For beginners, let's get this out of the way, I am a very modest person. I have never been one to show skin, and both pieces to some extent did make me feel a little weird. Not due to a lack of appreciation of the art, but more of concern that I would be judged for painting a naked lady. I mean as many women as I have painted, at what point will someone start thinking that I am attracted to women? Haha! Which is far from the truth. For me I love painting women personally, because they have smoother edges about them and represent beauty and grace (unless you are me who is as ungraceful as they come). Furthermore, nudity to me and in most art represents the rawness of ourselves. There is no expensive clothes, no fine jewelry, or anything separating us from the world. It is just us and being as we came into this world, showing our uniqueness. It is in this that I find that there is a pureness in nudity. The way the person is laying, the look on their face; all of this speaks to us and inflicts those emotions to us. Furthermore, If you look at the human body, not one person is absolutely identical, even our skin, in my consideration, is like that of a calico cat. I may have fair white skin, but I have patches of tanning in different spots, lots of freckles, and certain areas that show more red to it. Also, any kind of clothing on a person in a painting or a sculpture can separate them demographically and geographically, as well as tie them down to a time when that kind of clothing was common or popular, separating them and disconnecting them from the viewer. Nudity in itself is timeless, and can be connected with at any period in history.
Furthermore, nude art can be found all throughout history. Many of the famous pieces that are studied even today are nude artworks. Michelangelo stated, "What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?" Most of the art training programs, for those learning art, include nude figure drawing in the curriculum, and have since back to the days of the ancient Greeks. It would be impossible to teach someone how to draw accurate human anatomy without first understanding the human body. Even to depict a clothed figure, one needs to understand the mechanics of what is underneath.
All of this being said, practicing drawing or painting the nude figure is the only way to accomplish learning the anatomy of the body, as is the practice of learning how to draw the bones and muscles beneath the skin. Furthermore, the human body can be a beautiful thing to contemplate and this can be a useful artistic tool in and of itself, just as a landscape, a flower, or any other object that portrays beauty. They are similarly useful tools in the artist's toolkit. Most importantly and in my personal use and consideration, if the point of art is to express ideas about the nature of humanity and man's role in the world; then, it would be natural to expect that the naked body would be among the most powerful of those expressive tools and truly is. With this, I finish with, sometimes there will be nude artwork that comes from me. It is just something that will have to be accepted. It will always be with good taste, never too promiscuous, but at the end of the day, it is art.
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