The naked truth about nude art

Link to story by Jennifer Smith, reprinted here in entirety from the Kelowna Capital News
Published: August 27, 2010 11:00 PM

Linda Kersche, or “Emerald” as she’s known when she poses for figurative drawing sessions, slips into character for a photo with well-known local artists Julia Trops and Cory Dixon, whose work includes stripping nude to paint his own self-portraits.

The painting was pretty innocuous in Jane Everett’s mind.

Hanging on the wall of the Bohemian Café, dressed in a Japanese silk robe, her eight-year-old daughter’s portrait was nevertheless labeled child pornography by a patron and summarily removed.

Though the incident occurred 15 years ago, the sting of facing such a vile accusation still rings in Everett’s voice.

“I was just mystified. I had no idea what they saw,” she said. “That was my daughter, so the idea that I would be exploiting her in that way was just…”

There was a thought that the young girl’s close-cropped pixie cut made her look boyish—that perhaps this was a snap homophobic response.

When it was mounted on the wall of another café, though, even those seeking out the controversial painting causing all the fuss, left disappointed. They couldn’t find anything offensive at all.

Things had not changed much by 2002 when Julia Trops rented a studio in the Rotary Centre for the Arts.

Church groups would rent the city-assisted art centre on Sundays and Trops would return to work the next week to find her figurative drawings facing the wall.

“I remember there were people who would not even come into the studio because there were nudes in it,” she said.

In her eight years of work, Trops has developed a strong reputation both for her art and for the creative approach she’s taken to building a figurative art scene.

“I allowed the censorship to come in on me and say don’t do this,” she explains. “It didn’t last long, mind you, but I did experience that and I think that’s probably what’s made me so vocal and assertive to say ‘no, we can do this today.”’

And yet this summer, even with a well-attended group doing nude drawing all the time, even with nude portraits lining the walls of the Rotary Centre, it happened again.

A young artists’s portrait of his friend lying naked on a couch had to be removed from a real estate business on Bernard Avenue which offers space to up-and-coming artists. The Collective removed Cory Dixon’s six-foot male nude installation because an influential stakeholder did not like the subject matter and threatened to pull his business.

This time, the realtors operating The Collective were undeterred and chose to connect

Dixon with a property manager who could find him empty rooms in buildings for sale where he could show his work. The Arts Council of the Central Okanagan then offered to extend their insurance to cover the show.

Dixon took the opportunity and used it to go public with an issue that had been bothering him for some time. He wanted to talk about attitudes toward nudity, and in particular male nudity, in the Central Okanagan.

This past spring, he noticed the Kelowna Art Gallery had curtained off male nude portraits of a similar nature to his own by local artist Joice Hall. While nude women are a staple of art history and wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in a publicly-funded facility, the men were deemed pornographic and had to be shielded from view, lest parents grow concerned about children seeing them during school tours.

The gallery’s decision was a jumping-off point, but it sparked an interesting conversation which literally spilled out onto the street and over the air waves when Dixon was forced by bylaw officers to colour out the penis on the poster advertising his first show.

The absurdity of picturing the young student taking a black marker to his painting seems to hit a collective funny bone.

Callers to the Open Line with Phil Johnson, on AM 1150, suggested the city should lighten up, and giggles about the marker and the guy colouring out the penis, ran up and down Bernard Avenue for days.

But from what those callers said, Dixon believes he uncovered a naked truth about the Okanagan that’s been underplayed.

“Everyone has this idea that there’s this really large group of ultra-conservative, hillbilly, religious extremists living in Kelowna and that’s most of the people here,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think that’s the case.”

He titled his show Discus(t): Conversations on the male body.

As this summer of discussion draws to a close, he said, the main thing he has learned is that those framing the cultural conversation, defining Kelowna’s identity, may need more of an attitude change than the community long-criticized for its intolerance.

Dixon paints his friends naked. He also paints nude self-portraits.

To the unknowing observer, it’s easy to cast him as a gay artist, as many have this summer, and though he is not, he really doesn’t mind the association.

“I think even people who really like the work assume that I’m gay if they don’t know me and know my girlfriend, and I think that’s totally understandable,” he said. “After I started doing this and started looking into who does this type of work, most of them are gay artists.

“The male body is a topic that is really relevant to them for different, but similar reasons from how I’m looking at it.”

The most prominent example he can point to is Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund, and likely the foremost figurative artist in the world today. Though he married women, he socialized extensively in the gay community using his talent and bad-boy charms to burst onto the London art scene in the 1930s with drawings published in Horizon Magazine. His work includes portraits of his subjects, male and female, shown legs splayed, like Dixon’s work which caught the bylaw officer’s attention.

The UBCO student said he started painting men because he couldn’t connect with the model well enough when asked to paint naked women.

“I think most male artists paint nudes because they like looking at naked women,” he said. “I mean that’s the tradition. Since then, it’s changed quite a bit, especially with feminism and women’s rights and that sort of thing. That really changed nude painting because the way men look at women has changed.”

Dixon is a product of those new attitudes, raised in a time when women were at least vocally labeled as equal to men. Yet no matter how many ways he was told not to objectify the model in his classes, to connect with the person he was drawing he simply could not understand the model on that level.

“When you’re just painting someone in a class and it’s someone you don’t know, it’s almost like they’re this kind of movable mannequin or piece of meat for the three hours that you have them,” he said. “Painting the model is the same process as painting a box if you put a box in front of you.”

He tried experimenting with poses, but again found he couldn’t see past the images he had seen in advertisements and the paintings in art history texts. Without pants, she had that ‘just got out of bed, boyfriend’s T-shirt’ look. Without a shirt, she was the jeans commercial. Reclining without anything on—the museum wall.

He switched to men.

With men, he found he could connect to his subject better. Using people he knew, as Freud does, he could place his subjects in a setting which made sense for them and paint the model more as a person.

He decided to remove only the pants of his subjects because, in casting off the stereotypes and co-opted images, he realized he needed to break the chain of command of undress—first shoes and socks, then shirt, then pants.

“You never see a guy take his pants off first,” he said. “They always remove their shirt.”

People seem to like Dixon’s work. He’s had good traffic at his show and plenty of feedback.

For Dixon, the real problem now is getting those who support this type of work, or would otherwise have no issue with it, to establish that point.

“On one hand, there is this fear of a really vocal, super conservative bogeyman in Kelowna. But no one on the other side is speaking up,” he said.

Nowhere was this more evident than when he spoke to the Okanagan Institute, a discussion group held in the Bohemian Café each week.

In a room packed with the culturally attuned and artistically inclined, no one could say they had responded, even in a letter, when the Joice Hall exhibit was curtained a few months earlier; although everyone seemed appalled by the move and plenty were ready to chastise the Kelowna Art Gallery.

For Dixon, this is a bad habit.

“I think it puts the gallery in a really difficult place because they’re assuming that if they didn’t have curtains, there would be this big public outcry and calling out of the gallery,” he said. “It’s really easy to point fingers at the Kelowna public art gallery and say you shouldn’t have done this.

“At the time, even now in a larger picture, I think the community needs to be involved and say Kelowna is not this type of town. It’s not full of hillbillies,” he said.

“I think we just have this identity crisis where we think that’s what it is and we’ve had it since the ’80s. People who have grown up here, like myself, grew up saying ‘Oh yeah, there’s nothing here in Kelowna. There’s nothing here for us,’ when I don’t really think that’s the case.”

Having just finished classes at UBCO, he pointed to the university as a place where that voice could start.

“Where I wanted the discussion to go was to question why the community, the other artists, or academics didn’t speak out when the curtains went up.

“Why wasn’t anyone who has taught anything with gender at the university, and is involved with the creative and critical studies, speaking out? One of their mandates, I think, is to be involved in the community.”

Trops is a prime example of how that voice works.

Hanging on the walls of the hallway galleria in the Rotary Centre for the Arts these days is a large collection of figurative paintings—some with minimal covers, or draperies, others without.

It’s all work from the Livessence Society for Figurative Artists and Models, an active of group of 30 to 50 contributors.

You don’t catch any of the ballet moms running around the centre this summer shielding their daughters from the work, but the group watches carefully for such behaviour, ready to snuff it out at the first whiff of trouble.

There was one comment in their show last year.

“Someone said, ‘I don’t want to take my kids down to see nude artwork in a community building.’ Then instantly, because we were watching, trying to figure out who had written that, other people wrote down ‘there’s nothing wrong with the human body.’”

In the back corner of the RCA is the studio where Trops works. This one-time military woman who has travelled the world, capping her career off with a peacekeeping mission in Egypt, admits she’s more the airy-fairy, mystical type.

“I’m not a believer in a strict religion. I’m a believer in everything exists and has a valid form and, you know, it just depends on what side of the fence you’re on as to how you see it,” she said.

She believes women embody the creative principles and men the principles of aggression.

She believes in being able to work with the seen and the unseen and when she draws one of her models—put through a three-hour training program first—it’s as though there’s a line extending from her fingertips through them and back onto the page.

“It’s like vomiting on paper. It’s almost like it’s uncontrollable,” she said.

She draws up to 2,000 works a year but dismisses the word “work.”

“It doesn’t have to take hours and hours of painstaking labour. If you get to a point where you know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t take long,” she said.

Trops rarely draws men and when she does, the lines are harsh, contrived and seem to sharpen to her.

“From the readings that I’ve done, even in ancient times, the only reason that man was around was for his penis,” she says with a light laugh. “It was the women who did the gathering. It was the woman who did the cooking…If you were to look at any ancient civilization, the focus is on the female.”

Trops said her art is trying to get to the heart of her own feminine being. The model is simply the tool.

Bathed in colourful light her sensual figures dance across her page.

At one point, when she first arrived in the centre, she was doing six-foot tall Amazon women in charcoal.

“People freaked out,” she said. “They were six feet tall and they didn’t like that.”

Trops has found a way to speak out against those reactions.

“Anytime somebody comes in here and says nudes are not art, I say well then please don’t go to Italy, please don’t go to the Louvre, please don’t go to any part of Europe where there are churches. Stay in Kelowna. Be safe.”

Her Okanagan Erotic Art Show, which she started with friends Lauren Wilson and Angie Hanson, is growing bolder each year.

About to launch their third annual exhibition, after a disappointing partnership this spring saw the event cancelled, the group has opened its call for artists south of the border this summer.

“Every year we step it up,” she said, explaining how the artists showing their work, like the size and scope of the project, are growing bolder.

The first Erotic Art Show was hosted in Lake Country by Jody LaFontaine, owner of The Barn Gallery. She ran the invitation-only event for three years off her farm until pressure from the community shut it down.

Though she had someone checking tickets to be discrete, the event, which included a match your pin-up playing card icebreaker and scantily clad gay male bartenders, simply ruffled too many feathers for her to feel comfortable running her two businesses the rest of the year.

The Okanagan Erotic Art Show stepped into the void, starting where LaFontaine left off in 2007, with a small show at the Rotary Centre for the Arts included in the 2008 Wearable Art Gala.

From there, it was off to the Woodside Gallery, and this year she has partnered with Ex Nihilo, the Rolling Stones-connected Lake Country winery turning heads for its NHL-player parties and fascination with nude

figurative work.

Starting to firm up plans now, she said one highlight should be the “Tit-Elation!” party they’re planning in celebration of the breast.

“Breasts are like the epitome,” said Trops. “In northern culture you don’t show them. They are instantly linked to sex. They are instantly linked to motherhood.”

Ex Nihilo owner, Decoa Harder, wants to explore the relationship between sensuality, the breast and breast cancer, using the event as a breast cancer fundraiser.

“I think it would be an amazing message to get out to the public that there is more to sensuality, for both men and women, than the breast,” said Trops.

So far attendance at the erotic art shows is on the rise and Trops expects, as acceptance and even celebration of figurative work grows in the valley, the event will become a mainstay.

The Okanagan Erotic Art Show will run this year from Oct. 14 through Nov. 9 at Ex Nihilo Vineyards in Lake Country.

Note: Dixon has left the Okanagan to complete the two last courses toward his degree in fine arts in Germany. He plans to return to the area upon completion of his degree.

jsmith@kelownacapnews.com