I was recently reminded of someone I went to college with. He was a fellow art student, studying drawing. I was only in one class with him–a disappointing watercolor class[1]–so I really didn’t have a good idea of what sort of work he did. His watercolors were nice, but pretty mundane. I recall lots of still lifes and landscapes. Certainly not anything to get granny’s knickers in a twist.
Imagine my surprise when, on viewing his senior show, I was confronted with dozens and dozens of large-format, carefully rendered self-portraits of him–nude, mind you–with all manner of fantastical equines. Male equines. Very obviously male equines. The drawings themselves were in Prismacolor, and had a distinctly Precious Moments Meets Black Light Velvet Painting feel about them. The horses, unicorns (yes, unicorns), and centaurs (yes, those, too) were all of the large-, liquid-eyed variety, with exaggerated Arab heads and delicate feet.
Can you just imagine it? A room chock-a-block with homoerotic bestial fantasy art? Don’t you think, at some point, someone would have taken this poor kid aside and told him, “Dude, your kink is not okay”? Hard as it is to believe, I have to assume that this guy was actually graduated. The thought that such work would earn him a degree in fine art is more than a little mind-boggling.
As a funny aside, the reason I even saw his senior show is that it was held at the University Museum of Art, where I worked, and I happened to be on duty that weekend. Weekends at the MoA were when folks from the local community stopped by. Old folks from the local community. Old folks who were really not amused by the My Little Porny Exhibition. We got more complaints about that show than any other, including Sylvia Sleigh’s nudes, which made the local patrons all sorts of pearl-clutchy and cranky.
So, anyway, now, whenever I see fantasy art that involves equines, I think of My Little Porny Boy. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, when someone on Paint-L mentioned centaurs, I started giggling uncontrollably.
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[1] I think I’ve vented my spleen about the unsatisfactoriness of that class in the past.
red paper boat 