|
Re: The Naked City
Peggy et al.;
This subject is indeed oddly fascinating. I have an interesting, if dry, academic article entitled: "Nudity as a Costume in Classical Art", by Larissa Bonfante in American Journal of Achaelology 93 (1989) pp. 543 - 570. It is worth a read if you can get your hands on it. In a nutshell, the article shows how it was the Greeks whom we have to thank for our preoccupation with the nude in representational art. They first used nudes (males at the beginning, and later, females) to distinguish their culture from that of "barbarism". Nudity was used both ritualistically and artistically as costume. Everything from warding off evil to demonstrating cultural superiority were the offshoots of this. Plus, considering the unicity of all life as evidenced by, for example, the Golden Mean, the human body is representative of Nature in all its guises. Thus, human form, even today, is one of our ultimate teachers.
On a more amusing note, we had a male model at Angel Studios who went one further than the female models that Peggy referred to. While posing he would, often as not, sport a rather significant erection. (I won't go into how indadequate it made most of the males in the class feel.) But, he was so unabashed about it that everyone eventually got used to it. He, too, had the habit of checking out everyone's work between sittings and he would walk around (now naked, rather than nude) to look at the drawings. We finally asked him to put something on during these times after one student complained that it made her a little uncomfortable when she was sitting down at her bench (a drawing horse, I think they're called) and he would come over to look at what she was working on. His height, coupled with the position she was sitting in, put his unmentionables pretty much right in front of her face. Now, she wasn't at all a prudish type, but still, it made for a not-too-professional atmosphere at that moment. It really did come down to that strange, but true, reality that the model is nude on the stand and naked elsewhere.
Happy painting. And, oh yes, thank you Mike for the kind reference to my nakeds -- I mean, nudes.
Juan
|