Looking at Art

This ongoing series, “Looking at Art,” are oil sketches, done quickly in one hour or less. I aim to catch people’s body language as they engage with art.

The bodies I paint are erotic, although not necessarily sexual. In her powerful essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” poet Audre Lorde contends that restricting the erotic to sexuality alone is “tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.” For me, then, to tap into the erotic is to experience the connections with everyone and everything else in the world. I can connect things that I’ve been taught are inexorably opposite: mind and body, knowledge and experience, the spiritual and the political. Eros can heal these splits and release creativity. The physical act of painting images of other bodies creates a dynamic, yet balanced, eroticism.