Art and artists...

I found a new artist to follow -- Astra Zero. He does some beautiful horror work and seriously gay imagery, and he's also reimagined some famous paintings with a more overtly gay bent. He did one similar to Dore's The Ascension that was all nude males, full frontal.

The above image is AZ's version of The Fallen Angel by Alexandre Cabanel, who painted his in 1847. Both show Lucifer in a state of rage but also with a single tear under his eye. The main difference between the two is AZ's figure appears to be older and darker than Cabanel's, a bit more beefy and well-formed instead of a youth. And seems almost hurt and not just angry. To me, this makes his more meaningful.

I ordered an 8x10 print of AZ's because it so suits my mood, as of late. I'm actually watching cozy little British murder mysteries on Britbox and Acorn to draw me back to humanity. I think this will help more than anything.

I sometimes wonder what kind of artist I might have wound up as, had I not shifted to film and writing. That seemed to be my destiny, when I graduated high school. Art classes all the way through school, and working in visual merchandising at a fine department store. Painting in my spare time. Even when I started back to university, I took art classes and felt more at ease in them.

Film was fun, but never really that fulfilling. I didn't connect with it like other people in the classes I took, and I think my work was more on the bland side. Even when doing photography, I felt a slight remove from it. I didn't have the patience to do it right. Didn't have the focus.

When I was in LA, I got involved with the Tom of Finland Foundation and exhibited at their Erotic Art Fair, the first few years, when it was in a cheesy little upstairs warehouse on the wrong end of Santa Monica Blvd. Sold everything I brought. Met some erotic artists who were serious about who they were. Tagame came the last year I participated, and a dealer who was building up a collection of gay erotica for some guy in Tennessee or one of the Carolinas commissioned a few things.

But that didn't interest me as much as portraits. Like John Singer Sergeant. Rembrandt. Da Vinci. Michelangelo. When I went to Europe for the first time, I spent most of my time at the Van Rijks Museum and the Louvre. I want to go back.

I wonder if I really would have turned out to be an artist, or just been another pretender working a day job and messing around with acrylics and inks and watercolors and painting portraits from photos of models I liked, at night. Art was always my way to decompress. I even did a self-portrait, once.

Guess I'll never know, now.