Sunday, June
11, 2006
A CALL TO ARMS
Wow that is cool.
Yesterday’s blog ended with the suggestion that people take
each other into their arms to express love rather than lose their
energies just dreaming about it, and today’s blog is a “call
to arms” to get people involved in a similar form of concrete
manifestation.
It’s not enough to complain about the state of things, something
must be done. We must be willing to go beyond our comfort zones
to change the way the world is evolving; in case you haven’t
noticed, we, collectively, are in a very bad place. Politically,
personally, concretely; we must change the way we see things as
well as the way we’re living.
We desperately need to find a new way of looking at love and sexual
expression to get away from the stereotypes of pornography. I have
been working on this for several years; drawing with a small group
of artists to transform pornography into loving images of human
and humane visions of sexuality. You can see these at the Victoria’s
Sketchbook link.
But the images from pornography have their obvious limits and
we’ve all felt the need to draw from life; from “real”
life, from lives that we can relate to, our own and others. As uncomfortable
as it was for me, I repeatedly photographed myself nude and set
up cameras on timers at the end of the bed and finally asked a trusted
girlfriend to photograph me and a lover so that we would have real
images to draw from. Those images are what many of the drawings
on this blog are based on.
NOW we are asking you to do the same… to send us images
of yourself for us to draw to be able to offer something true and
beautiful that can replace the overload of porn burned onto so many
people’s retinas. Your images will be treated in the same
way all the images have been treated on our sites; only drawings
are published so that privacy is respected. The actual process of
photographing oneself in a sexually-loving situation can be quite
liberating when you get beyond your initial resistance, as is seeing
images of others sharing sexual love. Makes us all feel a bit less
isolated because we can recognize that no matter how hidden and
forbidden non-pornographic sex may be, to better recognize the beauty
of it, it helps to actually see it.
Just before the Internet came into being, one of our artists spent
several years drawing photographs that families accepted to send
in showing the intimate moments of childbirth, and to thank them,
the artwork was mailed back to with their photos. This project is
no different in the sense that it also seeks to honor a natural
human function that has been badly misconceived and needs to be
seen from a new perspective. You might love seeing yourself making
love from the detached perspective that drawings allow.
For more details and to send images:
http://www.freewebs.com/transformporn/
tendernesstowardssex@yahoo.ca |
