life and work
http://www.bronwenhyde.com/blog/index.blog/1345914/in-defence-of-nudity-in-selfportraiture/
As a self-portrait artist who incorporates nudity into my work, I am finding it more and more common to have my motives for this questioned, which is something I now find alternately amusing and annoying. As has been evidenced by comments on my Flickr photostream, my bare feet are just as liable to be coveted by viewers of my work as my bare breasts, yet no one asks me to justify photographing myself barefoot. Although from time to time my work including nudity receives more attention than I feel is due to it than to those images where I am clothed, I see no reason to self-censor my ideas or modify my vision for images in this respect as the most important thing to me in creating images is to remain true to the ideas I have.
Questioning your motives, both in art and in life, is healthy; whether prompted by your own instincts or in response to others' criticism.
ive always found the critique of photographers way to harsh when self portraiture included nudity. the self portraits i have done with me in the nude got the usual treatment just another nude drawing. since my work consists of and relies heavily on the form in the nude i guess its just pare for the coarse. but why should a drawing or painting get less critique than a photograph? they are both not real in the physical sense, a 2d reproduction of what we look like. i will admit it that i have seen many of a paintings in galleries and museums that i have found more sexually arousing than a photograph. hell lots of the nude paintings from the renaissance, rococo, and mannerism; all the way up to the end of the romantic periods, have been a sort of pornographic device. does that make them any less relevant as a piece of art?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Saville
and this is my new favorite contemporary artist. i mainly love her treatment with the form as distortion, and a contemplation of what a body's image means in the larger context of how we view ourselves in the world. this is an artist for the fans of Lucian Freud and Peter Paul Rubens. she is also working in the size that i want to work in, larger than life.
As a self-portrait artist who incorporates nudity into my work, I am finding it more and more common to have my motives for this questioned, which is something I now find alternately amusing and annoying. As has been evidenced by comments on my Flickr photostream, my bare feet are just as liable to be coveted by viewers of my work as my bare breasts, yet no one asks me to justify photographing myself barefoot. Although from time to time my work including nudity receives more attention than I feel is due to it than to those images where I am clothed, I see no reason to self-censor my ideas or modify my vision for images in this respect as the most important thing to me in creating images is to remain true to the ideas I have.
Questioning your motives, both in art and in life, is healthy; whether prompted by your own instincts or in response to others' criticism.
ive always found the critique of photographers way to harsh when self portraiture included nudity. the self portraits i have done with me in the nude got the usual treatment just another nude drawing. since my work consists of and relies heavily on the form in the nude i guess its just pare for the coarse. but why should a drawing or painting get less critique than a photograph? they are both not real in the physical sense, a 2d reproduction of what we look like. i will admit it that i have seen many of a paintings in galleries and museums that i have found more sexually arousing than a photograph. hell lots of the nude paintings from the renaissance, rococo, and mannerism; all the way up to the end of the romantic periods, have been a sort of pornographic device. does that make them any less relevant as a piece of art?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Saville
and this is my new favorite contemporary artist. i mainly love her treatment with the form as distortion, and a contemplation of what a body's image means in the larger context of how we view ourselves in the world. this is an artist for the fans of Lucian Freud and Peter Paul Rubens. she is also working in the size that i want to work in, larger than life.