A fine art, film, history and literature site oriented to, but not exclusively for, the gay community. Please be aware that there is mature content on this blog. Information on images and links to sources will be provided if known. Enjoy your visit and please subscribe.
The Artwork of Chip Whitehouse
Chip Whitehouse is a gay artist exploring in his artwork the theme of sexuality with its associated emotions. He studied Fine Art in the field of Oil Painting at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, and studied Fashion Design at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in San Francisco, California.
Ethan Murrow received his B.A. in Studio Arts with a focus on painting and printmaking from Carleton College in Minnesota. His Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing, painting and sculpture was awarded by the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Murrow is currently living in Boston where he is a professor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.
Ethan Murrow creates large-scale graphite drawings that are translated form film and photographic narratives. His rendered drawings focus on innovative and explorative characters attempting with confidence and passion to succeed in their endeavors, despite the unlikely outcomes. Murrow incorporates the art of perspective with great skill; his use of vantage points render the scenes real but intentionally absurd.
Murrow’s drawings are dependent on still captured photographic images. They resemble the look and feel of early cinema and black and white photography due to their grainy surface appearance and use of gray scale tones. The process of drawing is extensive, The sense of depth is developed by complex layering and mark-making, filling large areas of space on the drawing surface, sometimes measuring up to fourteen feet wide.
Ethan Murrow’s series “Zero Sum” consists of a body of work centered around the same single figure shown in different positions as the figure hurtles upward or falls downward through the air. The heavily bandaged figure appears poised in the air, contorted but floating peacefully. A combination of both awkwardness and beauty is achieved in this series.
Drawing inspiration from contemporary literature and historical articles of Victorian-era exploration and voyages, Murrow plays with these romanticized stories that hid the grim realities and human mistakes, by depicting a new set of explorers who are foolhardy and quite apt to fail. His “Narwhal Hoax” series shows pseudo-scientists faking their expeditions; his “Doomed Explorer” series show explorers on oddball quests who never show any doubt of success.
Ethan Murrow’s work is represented by Obsolete Gallery, in Venice Beach, California; Winston Winston Wächter Fine Art, in New York City and Seattle; and La Galerie Particulière, in Paris. His work in in collections worldwide, including the Guggenheim Foundation.
Edward Julius Detmold, “Common Wasps”, From “Fabre’s Book of Insects”, 1935, Tudor Publishing Company
Painter, printmaker and illustrator Edward Julius Detmold was born in London in 1883 along with his twin brother Charles Maurice Detmold. Provided patronage by their uncle Edward Shuldhan, the two brothers studied painting and printmaking under the tutelage of their uncle Henry Detmold, also an artist. In 1898, at the age of 13, the twins exhibited watercolors at the Royal Academy, and issued a portfolio of color etchings that same year that quickly sold out and brought them notoriety. In 1899 Edward and Charles began illustrating books jointly, begining with “Pictures from Birdland”, which was commissioned and published by J.M. Dent. This was followed by a portfolio of watercolors inspired by Kipling’s “The Jungle Book”.
The brothers’ tandem success, however, was ended with the sudden death by suicide of Charles in 1908. Edward Detmold threw himself into his work, beginning with an illustrated ” Aesop’s Fables” that included 23 color plates and numerous pen and ink drawings. This began a decade of intense productivity, in which the Detmold’s execptional eye for the detail and complexities of nature allowed him to achieve his place among the best illustrators of the Victorian era.
Edward Detmold continued to illustrate numerous books, including Maurice Maeterlinck’s “The Life of the Bee”, Camille Lemonnier’s “Birds and Beasts”, his own “Twenty Four Nature Pieces”, and Jean-Henri Fabre’s “Book of Insects”. However by 1921, after witnessing the horrific results of World War I and feeling a disillusionment with his own art, he had reached the end of his zenith. Though Edward Detmold went on to illustrate one last edition of “The Arabian Nights” in 1924, he had effectively ended his career with the publishing of a literary book of aphorisms entitled “Life”. He retired to Montgomeryshire, England, and died in 1957, also from suicide.
Top Image: Tara Geer, “Trying to Fly”, 2013, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 47 x 55.25 Inches
Bottom Image: Tara Geer, “Fluent in Darkness”, Date Unknown, Charcoal, Pencil and Pastel on Paper, 30 x 40 Inches
Tara Geer was born in Boston, and received from Columbia University both her BA – a double major in Art and Art History, graduating magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa – and her MFA, receiving a teaching fellowship as well as the Louis Sudler Prize for excellence in the arts and the Joan Sovern Prize from Columbia’s School of the Arts.
Currently, she is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia and in Art and Art Education at Teachers College. Geer also trains teachers and staff in “Visual Thinking Strategies” at the Brooklyn Museum, El Museo, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, among others.
From observation, Tara explores life’s quiet details, the heft of an object, the spaces between close parts, the feel of a thing – externally informed but internally impelled. Her drawings are often large and kinetic charcoal universes, neither bodies nor landscapes but microcosmic resolutions of form and psyche. Sometimes they are exploding webs of cells and scaffolding, thumbprints and scrawl, while other times they are more figurative, familiar, discrete.
Artist Unknown, “Ghost in the Shell” Illustration, Date Unknown
Jesús Martínez Flores, Untitled, Sketchbook Illustration, (Red Dogs)
Born in 1982, Jesús Martínez Flores is a graphic artist, sculptor and painter who currently lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico.
The Artwork of Mel Odom
Mel Odom majored in illustration at Virginia commonwealth University and then attended Leeds Polytechnic Institute of Art and Design in England, He moved to New York City in 1975.
His artwork with its Art Deco style established him as a commercial artist initially with erotic illustrations for magazines such as “Blueboy, “Viva”, and Pllayboy”. During the 1980s, Odom’s work covered a wide range of commercial media: record and book covers, Illustrations for the sci-fi magazine “Omni”, and a front cover for one of the 1989 “Time Magazine”.
Note: More Images of Mel Odom’s work, both drawings and paintings, can be found at the artist’s Instagram site located at: https://www.instagram.com/mel.odom/
Sigmar Polke, “Kandinsdingsda”, 1976, Gouache, Acrylic and Collage on Paper Mounted on Canvas, Artist’s Estate
Sigmar Polke was born in Oels, an east German region, in 1941. His family soon fled to west Germany in 1953, settling in Dusseldorf where Polke studied at the Dusseldorf Art Academy between the years 1961 and 1967. While still in school, Polke, along with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer, founded the Captialist Realism movement.
The Capitalist Realism movement incorporated aspects of American Pop Art’s interest in consumer and popular imagery with abstraction and an emphasis on a progressive use of mediums. The movement also instilled into their works satirical commentary about consumerism, the political climate in Germany at the time: the movement’s name was a play on the Russian art movement of Socialist Realism.
Polke’s artistic practice embraced and incorporated mistakes such as drips, tears, and copy printing errors into his paintings. His experimentation with photography in the 1970s intentionally disregarded the standard rules: dropping the wrong chemicals onto the paper, turning on the light during development, brushing the developer on selectively, using exhausted fixer. Polke would then use these ‘mistakes’ to explore his interest in abstract pictorial space.
Polke’s irreverence for classical artistic practices made for an innovative and stylistically uncategorizable body of work that used photography and printed materials as source material, silkscreened layers on top of painterly expanses, chemical substances and other non-art materials within a collage-like aesthetic.
Greg Hildebrandt, Illustration from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”, 1985, Unicorn Publishing House, Inc.
Artist Unknown, “Mort de Madame Blanchard”, 1819, Newsprint Illustration
While not the first female hot air balloonist, Madame Blanchard was the most well-known: King Louis XVIII, after seeing her performance, named her the “Official Aeronaut of the Restoration”. She was the first female to pilot her own hot air balloon, and the first to make ballooning her career.
Unfortunately, several years after her husband, also a balloonist, died in a ballooning accident, Madame Blanchard was also killed. During a demonstration for a large crowd in Tivoli Gardens, she lit several fireworks, which ignited the gasses within her craft, causing her to fall to the ground and sustain fatal injuries.
Max Ackermann. “Energie II (Schwingung)”, 1973, Pastel, 70 x 50 cm.
Simeon Solomon, Frontispiece to His Book ‘”A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep”’, 1871
Solomon’s “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep” is an important early gay text, a prose poem,which was privately published in 1871. The image above is captioned “Until the day break and the shadows flee away”, a quotation from the Bible in the Song of Solomon 2:17.
The performance by Neil Bartlett, entitled “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep”, was an one-man homage to the life and work of Pre-Raphaelite painter Simeon Solomon. The performance was originally created and performed at the height of the first wave of the British AIDs epidemic in 1987.
Alfonso Ossorio, “Saint Martin and the Beggar”, 1940, Ink, Gouache, and Watercolor on Paper, 52 x 37 cm, Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines
Born in August of 1916 in Manila, Alfonso Ossorio was an abstract expressionist artist of Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese heritage. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, 
graduating in 1934. Ossorio studied fine art at Harvard University from 1934 to 1938, and continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a United States citizen in 1933.
Discovered by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons, Alfonso Ossorio had his first show, featuring his Surrealist-influenced works at New York’s Wakefield Gallery in 1940. Following World War II service in the US Army as a medical illustrator, tasked with drawing surgical procedures on injured soldiers, he took some respite in the Berkshires, a region in western Massachusetts known for its outdoor activities. It was there at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Festival that Ossorio met Edward Dragon, a ballet dancer, who would be Ossorio’s life-long partner.
Through his connection with Betty Parsons, Ossorio became acquainted with the work of Jackson Pollock. Becoming both an admirer and a collector of Pollock’s expressionist work, he and Pollock soon developed a close friendship and reciprocal influence on each others work. 
Later in 1951, through critic and art historian Michel Tapié, Ossorio established a contact between Pollock and the young Parisian gallery owner Paul Facchetti who realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952.
In Paris in 1951, Ossorio and Edward Dragon frequently met with artist Jean Dubuffet and his wife Lili. While they were visiting, Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for his monograph on Ossorio entitled, “Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio” and introduced Ossorio to art critic and collector Michel Tapié. Tapié organized a one-man show at the Studio Paul Facchetti of Ossorio’s small, luminous “Victorias Drawings”, which Ossorio made while visiting the Philippines. Produced using Ossorio’s experimental drawing technique of wax-resistant crayon on Tiffany & Co. stationary, the works in this series are counted as some of Ossorio’s most innovative.
Dubuffet’s interest in art brut opened up new vistas for Ossorio, who found release from society’s preconceptions in the previous unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, 
driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.
On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio and Edward Dragon purchased an expansive 60-acre estate, The Creeks, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, in 1951, where they lived for more than forty years. Alfonso Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at The Creeks estate and the other half came to rest nine years later at Green River Cemetery, alongside the remains of many other famous artists, writers and critics.
Alfonso Ossorio’s works can be found at The Creeks, the Harvard Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, among others.
Second Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Tree”, September 1940, Ink and Graphite on Paper, 51 x 33 cm, Private Collection
Bottom Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, Untitled, 1941, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, Estate of the Artistjpg
H. A. Petersen, “The Flying Liner”, Date Unknown, Illustration from the Judge Magazine
The “Judge” was a weekly satirical magazine published in the United States from 1881 to 1947. I was launched by artists who had seceded from its rival magazine “Puck”. The founders were cartoonist James Albert Wales, dime novels publisher Frank Tousey and author George H. Jessop.
This illustration shows the optimism at the time that science and innovation can overcome the forces of nature that affect man. Here a modern ship, the Aerotania, is given the ability through the wonders of scientific advancement to jump over icebergs, one of the deadly hazards to shipping.
Cover Art for Raw, Number Six, 1984, Published by Raw Books and Graphics, New York
“Raw” was a comics anthology edited by Art Spiegelman, a cartoonist best know for his graphic novel “Maus”, and Françoise Mouly, a Paris-born designer and editor. The anthology ran from 1980 to 1991. It was a flagship publication of the 1980s alternative comics movement, serving as a more intellectual counterpoint to Robert Crumb’s visceral “Weirdo”, which followed in the underground tradition of “Zap” and “Arcade”. The anthology “Raw” was one of the main venues for European comics to reach the United States at that time.
“Raw” featured a mix of American and European contributors, including some of Spiegelman’s students at the School of Visual Arts, as well as various contributors from other parts of the world. These included the Argentine duo of José Muñoz and Carlos Sampayo , the Congolese painter Chéri Samba, and several Japanese cartoonists known for their work in “Garo”, a monthly manga magazine. Though comics were the main focus, many issues included galleries of non-comics illustration and illustrated prose or non-fiction pieces.