Uncool artist residency project 

The Gentleman Spread

How beautiful is a man’s naked body? How often Is this beauty celebrated on canvas by a woman artist? I used to feel uneasy drawing and painting a man’s private parts so I chose to address it. This series portrays men, naked as they came, spreading their legs, but above all spreading love, joy, respect, thoughts… It is a beauty quest through masculinity and poetry. Naked men with no trace of vulgarity or pornography, yet naked men who will not conceal their manhood.

I love men and I’ve always been fascinated by men’s beauty. Although I know a lot of art and artifacts revolve around or represent more or less graphically, the penis in all shapes and sizes, I find there is not enough work out there representing the man’s body, nude, vulnerable, poetic, sensual – yet not pornographic. Especially not through a woman’s gaze. This is my declaration of love to the man’s body, as an artist, and this is a chance for me to portray men in another light, soft and tender, beautiful and peaceful… Joyful.

I love acts of kindness and civility, like holding the door for the person behind you, giving your seat to a stranger on the bus, and greeting someone just because your paths cross. I want to press here that age, gender, and skin color don’t matter really, random acts of kindness. 

I cannot stand mannerisms and fake outrage. So when the manspread systematic shaming began, although I got where it was coming from, I also didn’t feel aligned with where it was going. A natural resting position for a human is to sit with legs wide spread. Is it the most gracious of postures? First of all who decides? But okay, perhaps not. It’s animal, it’s natural. It doesn’t need to be pretty. I think we ought to be untamed, spread our legs provided we don’t take someone else’s leg space, spread our acts of kindness, spread our love and our wings if we want to. 

Another way to look at it is, that I don’t want to say too much so that people can actually choose to see whatever they wish to see but this is important: I’m lucky enough to be surrounded by kind honest, and respectful men. Between the manspread, the #metoo movement, and every other form of realization that feminism has yet a long way to go, observation with which I completely agree and that patriarchy is still super toxic in many more ways than we’d like to think, I just want to remember my brothers, and friends who are good men and stop systematically antagonizing them. 

That’s where it started. In 2019. Where I want it to go now is, that I realize my message doesn’t need to be around men specifically in such a binary way. I want to use my time here to continue expanding my view- like I always do in NY, and refine my message. It’s not so much about the gentleman spread anymore but about all living things spreading love.