Born On This Day- July 9th... Artist David Hockney

"The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist."

He was already a noted & accomplished painter in his native England, but David Hockney's style, point of view, & medium changed from oils to acrylics when he moved to LA.,a city he had fantasized about, in 1963.

Hockney: "Within a week of arriving there in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I'd passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas & won some money, got myself a studio, started painting, all within a week.& I thought, it's just how I imagined it would be."

The Hockney that I know best is the painter of sunny California skies, swimming pools, palm trees & boys. His work in this period seems to me to be a modernist slant on color Polaroids & snapshots from the life I was brushing up against when I attended college in L.A. from 1972-76. I actually attended an all-boy pool party at a famous producer's Beverly Hills estate & Hockney was one of the guests.

He is absolutely one of the Husband & my favorite artists, & though I would love to own his paintings (they sell in the millions), as a lowly working class gentleman, I am having to be content with my "coffee table" books & postcards of his work.

David Hockney is also notable as a draftsman, printmaker, stage designer & photographer (photo collage). His personal style,with his trademark round glasses & mop of blond hair, & spirited personality also engaged the Husband & I & we took to wearing his colorful horizontal striped ties & Izod shirts in the early 80s. Hockney has always been openly gay & has enjoyed a variety of relationships with men, describing himself as a "playboy".

He was so important to me that for a certain period in the 1980s, I emulated his style, wearing Izod shirts with knit striped ties & round glasses. In the new century he continues to inform my life by with his talent & style. I admire his talent & his bank account.

Born On This Day- July 8th... Artist Stephen O' Donnell

Artist- Stephen O'Donnell paints in what would have been the dining room of his charming 3rd floor walk-up in Portland's Nob Hill neighborhood. He shares the bohemian digs with his wife, writer- Gigi Little & his canine- Nikki.

I discovered Stephen O’Donnell’s astonishing paintings at a local gallery in my first month of living in Portland. I returned a few days later with The Husband in tow. The Husband was simply jaw-dropped in awe of the paintings. He would later design a penthouse bedroom for Portland’s Street Of Dreams around one of those paintings.

The Husband calls me out as a star fucker, with more than a little bit of truth, I own up to being undeniably attracted to people who possess unique, world class talents. I strive to be sly & undemonstrative in their presence, but I will end up gushing at some point.

As I sat opposite Stephen O’Donnell in a Nob Hill café, on a rainy, late spring afternoon, I attempted to engage the artist in regular guy conversation as my mind raced along with an inner-dialogue of: “Oh my, I am talking to my favorite painter in the world! I think I know him well from his masterful paintings, but I know so little about Stephen, I am looking right at him. He has freckles! He is so tall, masculine & sure of himself…”

During the chatty visit, I learn that O’Donnell has strong Portland roots, both of his parents grew up here, but he grew up all over California, including a stint as a singer in San Francisco.

O’Donnell told me of always identifying as an artist, drawing since early childhood, but never really dared to live his avocation until his late 30s, when O’Donnell in a grand jete of daring, showed some of his paintings to a Portland Gallery & promptly was given a show.

O’Donnell has no formal training & astonishingly, as a self-taught painter he possesses a sure hand with assured adroitness, clever command & fine, fanciful finesse.

O’Donnell paints in the genre of Portrait Historié, which is characterized by a recognizable subject, depicted in historic or mythological guise, such as a monarch, military leader, wealthy merchant, clergy or actor. His work is strictly portraiture, usually self- portraits, but not literal self-portraits. O’Donnell does not use photographic studies or even a mirror. He does extensive research & then reimagines the costumes & the settings. He is most often depicted in women’s finery of his own imagining, in a castle, chateau or citadel of his own design.

His paintings are masterfully mysterious, witty, gender confused pieces, with the artist’s beard line apparent & his chest hair visible above the brocade of the gown. O’Donnell: “More often than not, I represent myself in women’s costume. The female side of my personality is very developed, so it feels very natural to go with female costume, which is usually the most elaborate, the most picturesque.  & it’s also usually the most fun.”

O’Donnell’s pretty & charming wife, the Portland writer- Gigi Little, told The Husband that the details of threads, feathers, fabric & metallic elements that we admired do much, are audaciously technical, masterfully achieved with a brush with a single tiny hair.

O’Donnell’s current solo show- Des Jeux Sérieux de Beauté can be seen through August at Winston Wachter Fine Art gallery in Seattle. A Portland show will be available for viewing in Autumn 2012 at Froelick Gallery.

I am so shallow, I now claim Stephen O'Donnell as "my favorite painter & good close personal friend." My first lottery winnings will be spent on an original O’Donnell to hang at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. 

Images used with permission from the artist

Considering Don Bachardy On His 78th Birthday

3 films come to mind today as I consider Don Bachardy on this birthday: Cabaret, A Single Man & the unexpectedly uncommon documentry- Chris & Don: A Love Story.

Christopher Isherwood has been one of my favorite writers starting in high school when I learned the Cabaret connection. It was a revelation to read at the start of the gay liberation movement in the early 1970s, of Isherwood leaving England & traveling to Berlin in 1929 to meet boys. His enthusiasm for the boy bars & cabarets gives unfading allure to his look at bankrupt Germany entertaining itself during Hitler’s rise to power. As a gay man, Isherwood identified with the crushed, the criminal, the cast-off, he had to hide aspects of his personal life; defying convention to find love.


By the time Goodbye to Berlin ( the basis for the play & screenplay of Cabaret) was published, Isherwood was living in the USA.  In 1939, Isherwood had published 4 novels, 3 plays, a memoir & a travel when he landed in NYC in 1939 with his lifelong friend-  poet W. H. Auden. Auden settled in Manhattan & Isherwood went to Hollywood. He had been a movie fan since childhood & he soon became a well paid screenwriter.


Isherwood had many friends & lovers in his new country, many of them famous. He met 18 year old Bachardy at the Will Rogers State Beach in October 1952. Bachardy began visiting the Santa Monica beach in the late 1940s with his older brother, Ted. Bachardy: “At first Chris was attracted to Ted. But Ted was a manic-depressive schizophrenic. During his 3rd breakdown, I was distressed to realise I could no longer rely on him. Chris felt sorry for me & he was so successful in cheering me up that we formed a special bond.”


By Valentine’s Day, they had initiated an intimate relationship that lasted until Isherwood's death in 1986. They were a high profile, openly gay couple during the era of McCarthyism, when homosexuals were being driven out of the government & the film world.

A portrait of the pair by David Hockney

Isherwood & Bachardy seemed to live an enviably enchanted existence in their hillside Santa Monica home, where they entertained the leading figures of the world of arts, literature, & the movie stars that Bachardy once sought out for autographs. Yet the documentary- Chris & Don: A Love Story reveals that the couple worked hard & long to achieve their bliss.


From the start, the men's relationship was challenging: Bachardy was 30 years younger than Isherwood & was so boyishly handsome he seemed underage. A student of theatre at UCLA when they met, Bachardy soon felt overwhelmed by Isherwood's vast array of famous friends. Isherwood encouraged Bachardy's talent for drawing & eventually Bachardy did become an internationally acclaimed visual artist. Bachardy: “I was 18, Chris was 48. He had to move out of his home because the owners, close friends, were very uncomfortable about the age gap, blatantly accentuated by my callow appearance. Chris had other friends who disapproved, too, & he broke with them because of me"


Teaching Bachardy gave Isherwood sizable satisfaction. Bachardy: “We were intensely close while I went to college & then art school. I decided I wanted to be a painter, & Chris encouraged me right from the beginning.”


In a 1960 entry in his diary Isherwood wrote: “Don matters more than any of the others. He imposes himself more, demands more, cares more, about everything he does & encounters. He is so desperately alive.”


Isherwood’s success, & his affairs with Stravinsky, Tennessee Williams, Stephen Rutledge, Truman Capote & others, his experience & his demanding nature made their relationship troublesome to Bachardy:  “I needed to establish my own identity. Some of Chris’s friends were kind, but mostly they treated me as the young boyfriend or even just a bit of fluff.”


Bachardy moved to London to study painting. His first shows in London & NYC attracted all kinds of admirers & good reviews, plus he was talented, together, & temptingly young.  Bachardy: “Chris had always had sex friends outside our relationship, & he had been frank with me about his sexual adventures in the years before he knew me. Since I had very little sex experience before Chris, I began to feel deprived. I told him it was unfair to deny me the freedom he had enjoyed. I was usually discreet about my adventures, but I know he was tormented. We had a couple of really difficult years & in 1963 I considered leaving him. We did split up for a few months.”

Self Portrait

In his misery Isherwood wrote A Single Man; the theme of emotional loss reflected Isherwood’s fear that Bachardy would leave & that he would die alone. Ironically, Bachardy thought up the title A Single Man. He has a cameo in the film, & is credited as a creative consultant.

Bachardy & Isherwood survived the 1963 break-up. Bachardy: “Chris allowed me the freedom to have sex with other men, & the comparison favored Chris. I saw more clearly what a great treasure I had in him.” 


They were together for 33 years. Chris & Don: A Love Story, ends with a several scenes of Isherwood, dying of cancer, sitting for a series of portraits by his partner.  Bachardy:“Chris was in a lot of pain towards the end. But he had sat for me so often over the years, & I knew this was something we could still do together. Each day, I could be with him intensely for hours on end.”

The last of the series was completed when Isherwood was already dead. Bachardy remained alone with the body, producing some of his finest works when he himself was newly a single man.

Bachardy still lives in Isherwood's Santa Monica home, his residence for over 50 years, where he paints portraits. Bachardy did indeed become an esteemed artist in his own right. He has painted portraits of most famous folks of the past 50 years including: Fred Astaire, Bette Davis, & Montgomery Clift. He works every day, for hours at a time, with the passion & perseverance of someone much younger. He's one of the only portrait artists in the world who only paints live, he never uses photographs or even work from memory. Once the model has left the room, he puts down his brush.


"What is exciting is to work with the person and get all the input, all the vibration & the aura of a living personality, how can you do that with a photograph?”


One of Bachardy's most notable works is the official gubernatorial portrait of Governor Jerry Brown hanging in the California State Capitol. The California state official biography page for Jerry Brown features a photograph of the painting. I think highly of his work & I have a nice coffee table book of his portraits.

Governor of California- Jerry Brown

Still strikingly handsome at 78, Bachardy can be spotted riding his bicycle around LA. He remains a prolific artist. Bachardy is fond of saying that he is completely Isherwood's creation, but Isherwood's writing also was shaped through the openness of their relationship. I rather love him.

Recent self portrait

Dirty

The first time I saw a Tom of Finland drawing was in a downtown Spokane used book store near the bus station in the 1970. The image, buried at the back of a men’s physique magazine (this is pre-MEN’S HEALTH, but the same idea), was in a small ad for more “special” publications. It jumped out at me like a great big erection. It depicted a pair of muscular butch men with big chins & broad grins grabbing each other's bubble butts & straining packages while winking at the reader. I was startled & aroused. Tom of Finland's pornographic drawings of hunky, fuck-booted, big butted beefcakes banging the booty in charcoals, pencil, ink, & watercolors had my full attention, & remonded me that I would need to get to a gym.

Tom was born Touko Laaksonen in Kaarina, Finland, on this day-May 8, in 1920. His work is literally the masturbatory fantasies of a lonely young homosexual Finnish boy; he began drawing in his bedroom in the 1940s. Tom worked as an illustrator in the Finnish advertising business until the early 1970s, when he became a full time gay pornographer. He sold the idea of the male body as a pleased, pleasuring & pleasured thing decades before Calvin Klein thought of it.


Tom's greatest achievement was in drawing gay men who were masculine, happy & proud at a time when they were supposed to be effeminate, neurotic & shameful. This is certainly the reason why so many gay men are Tom of Finland fans. Today's gay porn is just a footnote to Tom of Finland, endless loops of a garage full of “regular guys” with huge cocks & massive pecs having spontaneous, shameless sex at the drop of the monkey wrench. His achievement was more than just making gay men feel good about themselves, or the feel of leather.

Tom had a profound influence on gay culture because, in a world that insisted gay men were sissies, Tom portrayed them as confident, macho & aggressive. Every drawing features a lumberjack, cop, construction worker, cowboy, biker, sailor or soldier. Not a florist, choreographer or dress designer in the bunch. He suggested something more than the masculinity in gay men. Tom turned it around on the straight world; you couldn't be masculine unless you were gay.

Before Tom, no one drew men like he did, unabashed sex objects & sex subjects, giving them exaggerated big chins, strong jaws, full lips, bubble butts, full bulges. His idea of masculinity & virility end up looking so... well, yummy. They seem to be seeking the attentions of the powerful Abercrombie & Fitch photographer Bruce Weber (a big Tom fan), or perhaps a Levi's commercial.

Tom's big break came in the 1950s from Physique Pictorial, semi-legal gay American magazine disguised as a straight men's bodybuilding magazine, which frequently put Tom's men on the cover. Half a century later, & 19 years after his death in 1991, the world has turned around & real men who look like Tom's drawings now appear on the cover of magazines like Men's Health. I was reading one while waiting to get my haircut at 7 Bucks A Whack (the perfect Tom of Finland business name) & the thing was full of advice on how straight men can turn themselves into something out of Tom of Finland.

The big question begs- is it art or is it porn? David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe & Andy Warhol were admirers & collectors of Tom's work. Not bad for a pornographer. He continues to have gallery shows & his work is in the permanent collections of 7 museums, including MOMA. While the debate goes on whether Tom's fuck machines constitute art, anyone can see that the macho men of Tom of Finland are hung… they're hung in museums.


* These were the most post-able images I could dig up.

Born On This Day- May 4th... Artists & Gay Icon Keith Haring

Someone stole my beloved Keith Haring Swatch watch. I think I know who it was, but when queried, they denied any possibility that they were responsible for it having gone missing. I saw the same one on EBay for $1600. The Husband: “you couldn’t get $1600 for that watch. You loved that Swatch into a state of being 'very used'. I wish I had $1600, I would buy you a new one.”

For most of the 1980s, I had prints of Keith Haring drawings & paintings, torn from Interview Magazines & displayed on the fridge. Unbelievable, there is a Haring, held by a Warhol magnet on my 2010 stainless steel refrigerator this morning. Some things just don’t change. The display face on my I-phone phone is a Keith Haring barking dog.

Keith Allen Haring was born May 4, 1958, in Reading, Pennsylvania, & grew up in Kutztown, a small Pennsylvania Dutch farm community. As a child, he fervently drew cartoons & gradually progressing to more complex compositions. He saw a display of Andy Warhol's work when he was in his teens, & was impressed by that artist's flat lines, his use of pop icons & mundane objects, & Warhol’s concept of mass-produced art. Warhol's elevation of the commonplace into art would be the crux of Haring's art.

He moved to NYC in 1980, to be at the center of both the art world & the gay community. He began to create his own graffiti of ambiguous looking animals & a human figure on all 4s, in the city's subways. Haring was employed as an assistant to gallery owner Tony Shafrazi, who gave him his first major exhibition in 1982.

During the mid-1980s, Haring's work brought him wealth & celebrity. His fans included Yoko Ono, Dennis Hopper, & even Andy Warhol himself. Madonna, explains that his art had such a vast appeal because "there was a lot of innocence & a joy that was coupled with a brutal awareness of the world."

Haring was among the generation of gay men lost in the first wave of the AIDS epidemic. He was diagnosed in late 1988, but continued his art until the very end, when he could no longer hold a pencil or brush. Haring's bold lines & figures carry poignant messages of vitality & unity. His legacy made an impact on late 20th century art.


Keith Haring was 31 years old when he died in NYC in 1990. He would have been 54 years old today. I cried this morning thinking about writing this post: for Keith being gone too soon, too young, for my loss of innocence, for my missing Keith Haring Original Swatch.

Until his death Keith Haring was devoted to creating cultural awareness about the disease & other gay rights issues. The Keith Haring Foundation was established in 1989 to assist AIDS related & children's charities, & still maintains the archives of his work. Haring generously contributed his talents to art workshops with children, created logos & posters for public service agencies, & produced murals, sculptures, & paintings to benefit health centers & disadvantaged communities. His foundation continues his legacy indefinitely. He leaves me a vision for the future.

The missing Swatch. If I left it under your bed in the late 1980s, may I please have it back?

Haring by Annie Leibovitz

"My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can. Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man & the world. It lives through magic."

Born On This Day- March 23rd... Illustrator J.C. Leyendecker

The Husband & I have a lovely J.C. Leyendecker coffee table book that has provided a great deal of viewing enjoyment over the past 3 decades. We had a framed print of one his advertisements for Ivory Soap. This print portrays an improbably handsome jazz age man preparing for his bath (the picture is now in owned by my dear friend Lil'Jake, the Portland designer & rapper). This piece is virile & All-American, yet homoerotic & stirring. Leyendecker was the most famous American illustrators during the first half of the 20th century, the Golden Age of American commercial illustration.

Leyendecker was responsible over 400 covers for leading magazines of the era, including The Saturday Evening Post. He created powerful advertising images like the Arrow Collar Man, an icon of masculinity, & the first male sex symbol & the first male advertising star. Ironic… Leyendecker was a homosexual & the model for the Arrow Collar Man was his lover. Leyendecker was drawn to depicting men in locker rooms, clubhouses, & workshops, extraordinarily handsome young men exchanging inexplicable glances. Few images are more overtly homoerotic than advertisements for Gillette in which scantily clad men teach each other how to use disposable razors.

Joe Leyendecker was born in Germany in 1874; his parents immigrated to America when he was very young. He grew up in Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago & spent several months in Paris in the 1890s with his younger brother Frank, also gay & also an artist. The brothers eventually moved to New York as they started to get more commissions.

In 1903, a striking young man appeared at their Greenwich Village studio.. His name was Charles A. Beach. Frank immediately hired him in Joe's absence. When Joe returned, Frank graciously allowed his brother the use of his model. Joe & Charles Beach were inseparable, both personally & professionally, for the next 48 years. Joe was 29 & Charles was 17 years old.

In 1914, the Leyendeckers brothers, & Beach, moved into a large home that served as their art studio in New Rochelle, New York, where they would reside for the rest of their lives. They hosted large parties attended by notables from all walks of life including F. Scott & Zelda. Frank died in 1924 of drug addiction. In the 1930s Leyendecker’s commissions began to dry up. Norman Rockwell, who was obsessed with Leyendecker & was very much influenced by him, replaced him as the best known illustrator in America.

Leyendecker, who was always very shy, would spend the last years of his life secluded in the house he had built in New Rochelle. He died in 1951. Charles Beach destroyed all of Leyendecker’s papers & unseen works on his death. Beach died a few weeks later.

Born On This Day- February 24th... Winslow Homer

One of the most prolific & important American painters & printmakers of the second half of the 19^th century & a favorite of the Husband & mine, Winslow Homer created an American, modern classical style, the visual equivalent of Henry Thoreau, Herman Melville, or Walt Whitman.

He steadfastly refused to answer personal questions from critics & potential biographers, he left no revealing diaries or other personal papers, & he produced no self-portraits. Homer was a lifelong bachelor & extraordinarily shy.

One of his most beloved friends was Albert Kelsey, a fellow artist that he met in 1858 in Massachusetts. In 1867, Kelsey traveled with Homer to Paris, where they lived together for several years.

Homer's closest companion of his life was an African-American man- Lewis Wright, who lived at Homer's Maine estate from 1885 to 1910. It is known that Homer's neighbors were made uncomfortable by the closeness of his relationship with Wright, especially when leaving the gym together after core class & sharing an IPod, sweetly, taking an earbud each. They both loved early R&B & soaking in natural hot springs.

A photograph, made while they lived in Paris, apes the conventions of marriage portraits, as do so many photographic portraits of male friends of this period. I am smart enough to know that many of the vintage photos in my collection represent male romantic fellowship & not sex partners, but we can never be really sure. As old as I am, I missed this epoch. But the title of the photograph is Damon & Pythias, famous ancient Greek heroes & lovers.