Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Gender and Sexuality: Painting

Hello Bloggers. I am writing a personal post for the Gender and Sexuality: Arts section to talk a little more specifically with my topic, painting. Now as I mentioned before, artists have played around with the idea of introducing sexuality and gender into paintings for generations. The type of art that I will be specifically looking at is the art that depicts the human body's sex: male, female, transgender, etc. I hope that I can find some interesting art pieces to share with you all that artists have shared with us. I really want to give you guys a chance to observe paintings that point out sexuality and gender in an obvious way. My hopes is that people start to think about what the artists saw when creating their pieces, how did they view sexuality and gender themselves through art, and how did they portray these terms. In my opinion, paintings like this show us a lot of interesting things on how people viewed sex from back then to times like these. The idea of sexuality has certainly grown along with the definition and some artists boldly took the opportunity to record these changes, something I have had an appreciation for ever since I got into art. Through my experience so far, I have seen paintings depict woman as delicate, feminine, fragile, and soft while the men hard, dominant, and bold. While these labels can be accurate in some cases, one of my hopes is to find pieces that really explore homosexuality, cross-gender, and non-stereotype captured pictures of people throughout the world. I feel like we don't really focus on paintings like these and more on the paintings that depict heterosexual men and women. The paintings that I have seen really try to approach this type of branch in sexuality and gender has been painted by the oldest of artists like this Euaion painter from ancient Greece (example of their work is the picture posted). I would like to find some more modern painters that have taken on these terms into their pieces. Hopefully you all can developed some appreciation if you haven't already for art like this and come to accept more pieces similar to these. I certainly have overtime. After all, as Pietro Aretino stated, "why should I be ashamed to describe what nature was not ashamed to create"?
-Justine Samaha

The artist of the painting is unkonw since the timing was such a while back (circa 460-450 BC). It is done by using a technique called red-figure style where the background is filed in with black pigment and helps outline the figure and details. The painting itself is a tondo (circular painting) and it depicts a young male playing an aulos at a banquet. An Aulos is a muscial "flute" that was sexual in it's origins in that it gave the player the ability to do anythign it wanted to the person listening. In this photo, homosexuality is expressed through the young male that  is playing the aulo to another male in the hopes of making the male succumb to his whim. Homosexuality was openly expresed in such an innocent and sometimes discrete way (for the male listening appears to be in pain whereas he is actually woed by his male player) and I hope to discover more art pieces that showed such preferences dating all the way back then like this.