I want to sort of set the record straight here. I don’t ONLY draw the nude human body because it’s beautiful or aesthetically pleasing or cute or nice to look at. That’s a part of it, for sure, all artists create because they see something inherently beautiful, even if it’s in anger or hatred or violence. There’s no shame in simply creating beautiful things just for the sake of the beauty, but I’m not doing that.
There’s a reason why I chose to draw children and families quite often, and it comes down to it being a form of protest. Protest against what I see as a dark path that humanity is striving towards. Protest against an insidious sexualization of the human form through fear, ignorance and shame. Protest against a false purity that demonizes the natural, and hides it behind a wall of both false and intentional lust.
Because, and I’m going to be real for a moment here, the ONLY reason to see any natural and non-sexual images of naked children as wrong is because you’ve been indoctrinated and deceived by ideas of desire and lust. Whether you yourself have that desire sitting somewhere in your head, however unwanted, or you’ve been convinced by society at large that EVERYBODY MUST have that desire, it matters not. You are unable to view images of families and children enjoying simple nudity as anything but shameful, wrong or desirable.
It is with that in mind that I seek to protest. To buck the trend. To put it out there, even if nobody really listens, that it ISN’T wrong or shameful or desirable. That nakedness is natural and acceptable and that it isn’t the body that is at fault, but the viewer. I draw these bodies because I believe they deserve to exist. That they deserve to be seen. That they deserve to remind us that humans shouldn’t have to live under a veil of disgust and shock. That you CAN just look at a body and find it just, simply, beautiful.
It’s an important message, I feel. Important and necessary, no matter how against the message society has become so demanding to be.. Because there ARE real monsters out there that DO lust, but the secret is that hiding the natural away doesn’t help fix the problem. It actually helps create it. If we never learn to have healthy views of the human body, the only thing left is to develop unhealthy views…. and it is happening faster and faster the more we become further and further shamed into hiding.
So I won’t hide. I want my drawings to stand for something a lot more than just “Oh, that’s pretty”. I want, no, need, people to have to stop and think and consider. I want people to feel a little bit uncomfortable, until such a time as perhaps with enough exposure they can learn that maybe it’s not so uncomfortable after all.
I refuse to white-wash my art for the sake of more widespread appeal. When you begin to do that, you become less an artist and more a producer…. and I just don’t have that in me.