NUDE

“Flesh is the reason oil paint was invented”    

Willem de Kooning

My nudes are more aesthetic than sexual. Their sources are art history and popular culture depictions of the nude. My nudes are art nudes; the goal is not pornography or satire but painterly depictions of a classic subject. The nude is a magnificent subject to paint. De Kooning said that oil paint was invented for painting flesh.

Are my paintings erotic? I hope so. Erotic can mean desire, longing, or aesthetic appreciation. It is expressed in Matisse’s “Luxe, Calme et Volupté.” The subject is sensual beauty. But is this the beauty of the young women being painted or the painting itself? I hope it is both. My nudes are an ideal state of the imagination, a constellation of aesthetic sensations.

The nude figure perfectly combines drawing, color, improvisation, invention, discovery, sensuality, form, and light. It is figure drawing with paint. I'm aware that the nude is controversial, and it should be. A person with clothes on generates specific content. It is always a portrait of a particular person in a specific circumstance. A person with clothes off can either be a portrait of a naked person or a nude with a more universal context. 

The female nude can mean all kinds of things. But to me, it is a sensual and beautiful formal device for making paintings. I admire many modernist artists who have the female nude as a principal subject: Bailey, Anderson, Freud, Balthus, Uglow, and many others. For these artists, the female nude is the center of their creative universe: Bonnard’s nudes in the bathtub, the odalisques of Matisse, the nymphets of Balthus, the obsessive studio nudes of Uglow. I see my nudes in this context. 

In the art traditions of India, the beautiful female nude is represented as Pavati, Lalita, apsaras, Vajrayogini, and countless other manifestations of Tripurisundari, or the triple goddess.  In these traditions, she is depicted as impossibly voluptuous and sensuous and represents the splendid manifestation of the manifold universe: alluring, desirable, and endlessly fertile.  In this form, she is the desire for the divine to express itself.  She is the personification of desire- in this case, the desire to manifest as an image, as a painting of herself. 

Many contemporary artists use the nude in a tragic context to paint the body as a metaphor for sexual exploitation or satire. I use the nude as an expression of sensual delight and joy.

Painting flesh allows a lot of invention with color. The trick is to make the flesh tones look natural. As Delacroix said, I can paint you a Venus with the mud from a ditch if you allow me to choose the surrounding tones. The nude allows for a lot of latitude with expressive drawing. You can exaggerate the length of an arm or the body's shape because all bodies look different and the same.

The nude is a creation or dream of art, a creation of an observer's imagination. The female nude exists in the imaginations of both men and women and is the subject matter of artists of all genders. There's a cheekiness to the nudes I'm doing, a slightly humorous or camp quality. This just comes with the territory. Matisse's nudes have a camp quality. Some of his cut-outs have Josephine Baker and her famous banana dance as subjects.

Paintings of beautiful bodies challenge and attract us in ways ordinary bodies do not. Of course, the nude is sensual and can be seen as sexually provocative. Well, all beauty is erotic to a greater or lesser extent. A sunset is visually thrilling and evocative; it's erotic in the sense of being sensually arousing. The female nude in painting is not about actual women. But she's still sexy.  The female nude can celebrate joy, sensuality, and beauty. If it provokes or alarms, so be it. It is intended to praise. The painterly nude is about the joy and pleasure we can experience in the body. When we can, why not choose joy? 

Jeffrey Carr; painter and former Dean of the School of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Scott Noel: “The Nude Contract”

Jeffrey Carr’s paintings of women in interiors, unclothed and posing,  immediately engage us in questions of what the pictures offer and how to assess them against our ideas about the body, self-presentation, and painting. The paintings are a burlesque of feminine allure. They don’t pretend to be made from life but are derived from glamour shots of nude models. The paintings are performances that strangely echo the performative quality of the models’ poses. The athletic postures, the windblown drapes, the shards of sunlight, and the perfectly calibrated reflective light generate a kind of spectacle that suspends the sympathetic viewer between the seduction of the image and the protocols of serious painting. Guessing the associations of Carr’s pictures of nude women, what do we make of their robust paintedness?

One of the strange things about sifting a group of Carr’s nudes is the degree to which the body almost disappears in its opulent, theatrical surroundings. The bodies are beautiful and inescapable, but like similar terms in an equation, they cancel out as the peripheral moments assume a greater status. This often happens among elements of the interiors and in flashes of sunlight and glimpses out of windows, which, because of the painting’s intimate scale, become assertive pieces of paint, a vibrating mosaic of dabs and sloshes releasing the silhouettes of the young women into our consciousness. Carr’s nudes have an aphoristic directness and concision. Like any memorable aphorism, the paintings are witty, even humorous. Painted gestures sometimes rhyme with the phrasing of a wall or a sofa with the marks that constitute an abdomen or a face. In their handling, the painterly likenesses create a circuit of analogies. 

Carr calls his pictures of models “nudes,” which denotes a complex historical enterprise wherein our erotic drives are enlisted and transubstantiated for the obscure purposes of civilization—at least, according to Kenneth Clark. The word “nude” derives from the Latin nudus meaning, roughly, “bare,” but is used mostly in a legal context to describe agreements and contracts inadequately supported by witnesses. An unwitnessed agreement was a nude contract. It’s fascinating that the body’s cultural prestige as an emblem of order and beauty called a nude should come to us through Roman legal usage. 

Is it helpful to suggest a painting of a young naked woman, which invokes both the context of erotic entertainment and august cultural precedent, is a nude contract, as a Roman might say? I like this idea because it helps me to escape certain habits that attach to the assessment of the stylized sensuality in Carr’s pictures. The paintings replace the naked literalness of desire with the painter’s longing for……what? I suppose every painter is different in how they name their longing, and, here, a painting of the nude is a “nude” contract in the sense that we have no disinterested or verifiable witness to the painter’s intentions. Even the artists themselves are legendary for their unreliability in these matters.

Carr emphasizes the French aesthetic impulse in his figure paintings. There is a line in the French tradition running from Watteau and Boucher through Ingres, Corot, Degas, Bonnard, Marquet, and Matisse that expresses the idea the naked female body can be detached from any individual instance and stylized as a poetic metaphor for life, order, and beauty. In contemporary practice, artists such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, John Currin, Kara Walker, and Lisa Yuskavage have deployed satire and observational rigor to deflate and reorient our inheritance from the French figurative tradition. I think Carr’s nudes acknowledge the skeptical, corrosive edge in current figure painting but, finally, evade their tendency toward either empirical puritanism or satire, which are both covertly moral projects. 

Jeff’s relationship with the nude is both loving and comic. The pictures make plain how we fetishize the body through illusion. However, there is still a human reality behind our will to illusion that implicates viewers and makers in an unwritten contract. The suffering of life requires beauty and illusion, and men and women continually agree to idealize each other. Society loves the illusion enshrined in the nude, the model loves her image, the artist loves to paint the world the nude discloses, the light loves the skin, the skin loves the paint, and the eye loves the light it sees with equal passion in a sunlit garden and on a woman’s shoulder.

Scott Noel; Painter and Professor of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

FRANK GALUSZKA:   “THE NUDE IS HAZARDOUS AS A SUBJECT” 

The nude is sure more hazardous as a subject because, from the get-go, it faces a wall of predisposition on the part of anyone who considers it.  The question might be the impossibility of addressing the nude in a non-political light.  The political colonization of art first sought to conquer the nude and feels it has captured it securely. The challenge is to win it (her) back. This political fight may have to be won before your (our) paintings can be looked at fairly by those who think they know what they are looking at and think they know what they are talking about.  Where is Kenneth Clarke when you need him?

Frank Galuszka; Painter and Professor of Art, University of California, Santa Cruz