Ex-gay

Ex-gay, virtual and actual mixed media distressed painting (16" x 16")

This is the next to the last in of the “LGBT Pictionary, Series I” (though according to completion date). Once again I’ve used my own images, as well as those found in magazines, newspapers and the Internet. If the image is not my own I bury it in layers of paint and torn paper. By doing that I distort the image until it becomes an obfuscated part of the mixed media distressed painting. Often the images are lost completely. I know they are there, but the viewer may not find them. Sometimes, however the image is a historic image in the public domain. In such a case I don’t purposely loose it in the layers of paint though that may happen.

I have also set type, made lines, scribbled, written, and mangled various parts and layers of the painting. During the entire process I exert my type A personality and dominate the disorganized happenstance by pushing everything into a series of larger and smaller concentric squares of exact dimensions and lines. That organization is peculiar to this set of paintings. In the past I have used straight lines at various angles to organize the space in paintings. I’ve also used geometric shapes and lines mixed together to create abstract shapes in older paintings. In the future I may use the same or different organizational techniques to create unity within the accidental process of the distressed mixed media paintings.

Queer

A new artwork in the LGBT Pictionary series of mixed media distressed paintings

Queer, May 13, 2013 (20" x 20") mixed media digital and actual distressed paint

The term, “Queer” (homosexual) was used as a pejorative epithet when I was in junior high and high school.  It had the baggage of nasty historic usage and etymology behind it. Of course that was back in the dark ages before people realized that the word “homosexual” was a word invented in the mid eighteenth century, and that in the real world there had not been a “homosexual” type of person, only behavior. Once the scientific classification as to type was seized upon by psychiatry as an aberrant “disease,” only then did our culture become fearful of “queer” people instead of sexual behavior. *

The painting, QUEER is meant to be a proud but partially obfuscated history of those “queer people.” *2   In the late twentieth century the term was deconstructed and rebuilt to designate LGBT people as well as others who view sexual variability in general as normal and positive human behavior. Also in this relatively new Twenty-first Century medical, psychiatric, historic and cultural studies have all identified the human types in the LGBT category as “normal” kinds of human beings, and the repurposed term “Queer,” means to take in that advance in scientific classification. *3



Notes

• See “Magnus Hirschfeld Archive for Sexuality,” http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/ECE5/homosexuality.html. Viewed 10:00 AM EDT, Thursday, May 23, 2013.

• All the image sources of historic “Queer” folk are documented here.
1. Image of Vaslav Nijinsky at Homo History. http://homohistory.blogspot.com/2012_10_01_archive.html. Viewed repeatedly from December 2012 to May 13, 2013.
2. Image of Langston Hughes from “Summer Nights’ by Langston Hughes,’ History is Made at Night, http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2013/04/summer-nights-by-langston-hughes-1902.html. Posted April 22, 2013, viewed 9:30 AM EDT, Saturday, May 11, 2013.

• 3 – I use the term “normal” loosely because contemporary science, historic, social, and cultural studies all have a variable (3- dimensional) understanding of human sexuality that does away with thinking in terms of what is normal and what is not.

Lipstick Lesbian

Lipstick Lesbian, May 16, 201 (20" x 20") mixed media distressed paint

This painting in the LGBT Pictionary was finished this past week and is 20” x 20”. It is number 32 of 33 paintings total. It includes writings taken from Weblogs submerged beneath the crumbling paint, my own mixed media images of lips, historical photos, Set type, torn paper photographic images of the painting, and of course the various layers of paint.

I’m approaching the installation deadline of June 3 and I’m getting excited to see the work hanging.

Read my entry from last week to discover more of the ideation behind the series.

Lesbos

Lesbos (16" x 16") mixed media distressed painting on wood panel.

Lesbos - also referred to as Mytilini after the capital - is an Island in the Mediterranean Sea. The term “lesbian,” is derived from Lesbos, primarily because of its most famous historic resident, the Ancient Greek Poetess, Sappho whose lyric poems were written to women, as well as men. Here I’ve created another mixed media distressed painting in which text, images and artworks about Sappho, and/or Lesbos are buried under layers of paint, as are other references and inferences about lesbians and the island. Among these I've included an image of the island taken from the NASA Website as well as a photograph of the capital city taken from Wikipedia.*

As usual the painting was made with many layers of paint, varnish, glue, wax, torn paper and my photographs taken of the artwork during various phases of production. The glitter stripes were made from photographs of glitter pulled from the digital morgue of my own pictures, and were enhanced with glitter glue.

I like to play with the random amorphous quality of the layered distressed paint and torn paper technique versus the crisp measured linear geometric (almost) perfect qualities I can create with camera and computer, masks, stencils metal rulers, tape, and X-acto knifes. Because of the way I work the paintings also reflect the ordered versus random nature of the universe in which I/we all exist.



*Those images not my own are in the public domain.

Smeared Paint

I’m working on #31 of the Gay Art Pictionary, a painting 20” x 20,” and I decided to make the paint look as though it had been smeared. So, I photographed the painting/montage in its current state and put that in Adobe Photoshop.  I made layers in order to prevent loss of all the images that are part of this particular mixed media distressed painting, titled, Queer. Finally, I made another copy of the Photoshop file, and merged all the layers and put a spin on it.  This image shows the spin.  I will post an image of the finished painting when the spin is incorporated into the actual artwork and it is completed, hopefully the end of this week.