model, Muse (really!)
The Erotic Beauty of the Female
The greatest thing is to be moved by love, to hope, to live. To be a man before being an artist!
In relation to this, I left Melbourne University, took master Zubvic's advice, and gave myself up to the influences of living with my mates, Zen and Pan. My paintings became as smooth as flesh, sensual and playful like a young girl for whom her body is a new discovery. This facet of my life found expression in works of a charming sensuality, like Holly Love, or Venus, since the models were a favorite of mine, i.e Holly aka Ivory Flame, a radiant English/irish beauty I feel I known before. Still in Melbourne, a German naturalpath called Lucy or Lu, entered my life, whom i never photographed, but inspired me even more to do exactly what master Zubivic said - just paint. Previous to that I had experienced observing Sapphic lovers with a deceptive friend. Humorous and informal as it may be, that vulgar trait did not find its way into my art, and urged me even more to explore the erotic beauty of the female, not the exploited beauty of the female.
My Love of women is clear in the photograph, which inspired the painting. It is clear too in To One in Paradise, a homage to writer Edgar Allan Poe. The erotism of reclining lovers has already inspired fine works by Arthur Huges, and one of my favorite contemporary masters, Jeremy Lipking.
In the mythological painting Holly Love, I created one of my most potent and certainly erotic images. Its another composite painting also. It touchs on the story of a true beauty Danae. The nude blends with copper and gold coins as Zeus impregnating her.
Carlotta was your quintessential universal traveller (accepted perhaps by the foreigners met while in Melbourne), Carlotta bends and twists her self into a tatsteful shape as she looks at herself and what she is comfortable with. The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves & not to twist them to fit our own image, otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them … (Thomas Merton)
