Beefcake Art

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about masculinity and the imagery associated with manliness. I have also been thinking about the nude body, and life drawing, and the strange thing that happens when you look at a naked person in an art class setting, and you see the body as an assemblage of shapes, volumes, shade values, colour tones. In an art class setting, the nude body is de-sexualised and de-mystified. In turn, it’s like we are given permission to look unabashedly, to stare even, but that looking and staring is also a kind of consumption, a kind of digestion, before re-presenting on paper or canvas.