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
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| 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. |
