bionicinbuff

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I wrote about conservative and religious hypocrisy today... Especially regarding the human body.

Read it here:

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I did a little naturist comic strip once. It focused on family naturism and was way before its time. Still would be... But I wanted to play with cartoony stuff again today, so I did.

You can read more here:

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A couple of new drawings today. I'm getting more confident and branching out some. I also have a new blog post:

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I did a figure drawing challenge today. I wrote about it on my blog:

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A few new drawings. I've been struggling with the balance between line flow and detailed realism lately. The last drawing of the male on the beach hits that balance very nicely in my eyes. When I try too hard for realism, things go awry.

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I read an article today that filled me with a fair bit of anger... I write about it here:

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I want to sort of set the record straight here. I don’t ONLY draw the nude human body because it’s beautiful or aesthetically pleasing or cute or nice to look at. That’s a part of it, for sure, all artists create because they see something inherently beautiful, even if it’s in anger or hatred or violence. There’s no shame in simply creating beautiful things just for the sake of the beauty, but I’m not doing that.

There’s a reason why I chose to draw children and families quite often, and it comes down to it being a form of protest. Protest against what I see as a dark path that humanity is striving towards. Protest against an insidious sexualization of the human form through fear, ignorance and shame. Protest against a false purity that demonizes the natural, and hides it behind a wall of both false and intentional lust.

Because, and I’m going to be real for a moment here, the ONLY reason to see any natural and non-sexual images of naked children is because you’ve been indoctrinated and deceived by ideas of desire and lust. Whether you yourself have that desire sitting somewhere in your head, however unwanted, or you’ve been convinced by society at large that EVERYBODY MUST have that desire, it matters not. You are unable to view images of families and children enjoying simple nudity as anything but shameful, wrong or desirable.

It is with that in mind that I seek to protest. To buck the trend. To put it out there, even if nobody really listens, that it ISN’T wrong or shameful or desirable. That nakedness is natural and acceptable and that it isn’t the body that is at fault, but the viewer. I draw these bodies because I believe they deserve to exist. That they deserve to be seen. That they deserve to remind us that humans shouldn’t have to live under a veil of disgust and shock. That you CAN just look at a body and find it just, simply, beautiful.

It’s an important message, I feel. Important and necessary, no matter how against the message society has become so demanding to be.. Because there ARE real monsters out there that DO lust, but the secret is that hiding the natural away doesn’t help fix the problem. It actually helps create it. If we never learn to have healthy views of the human body, the only thing left is to develop unhealthy views…. and it is happening faster and faster the more we become further and further shamed into hiding.

So I won’t hide. I want my drawings to stand for something a lot more than just “Oh, that’s pretty”. I want, no, need, people to have to stop and think and consider. I want people to feel a little bit uncomfortable, until such a time as perhaps with enough exposure they can learn that maybe it’s not so uncomfortable after all.

I refuse to white-wash my art for the sake of more widespread appeal. When you begin to do that, you become less an artist and more a producer…. and I just don’t have that in me.

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I didn’t get any sleep on Saturday Night. Maybe an hour at best, and broken at that. When I forced myself out of bed at 9am (rather than the usual 7-8am), I was groggy, nauseated and feeling rather broken and frustrated. Yet I set out to try and do a drawing anyway, despite the many misgivings I had to do so.

The figure in red in the picture above is the drawing I ended up with that morning. It’s incomplete and there was something about it that I just couldn’t feel happy about. It’s one of what was supposed to be two young figures playing around on a beach, but by the time I got the final penciling done I just gave up. I felt like throwing things against a wall and just THIS figure took me two hours to even get to this point.

So this morning, after I had actually got a decent night’s sleep, I went back to it and decided to trace the figure in the original photograph to help me see where I had gone wrong. Lo and behold, to no real shock of myself, I found out that the head, as usual for me, was the main culprit here. I had simply, even after drawing it over and over and resizing and trying hard to see the proportion properly, made it too small.

Once the head was wrong, the rest of the figure sort of just fell into line. As you see by my notes, the small head put the shoulders on the wrong plane, which caused me to get the torso proportion wrong, and then overcompensate the legs to make the overall length of the figure make some sense… and I draw a lot.

So even though I’m pretty experienced in drawing this sort of drawing, and have a lot of practice and a bit of skill, it always goes to show that one ALWAYS has some learning to do…. or even re-learning. Sometimes it takes more that just knowing how. You have to keep reminding yourself and take some time to figure out what’s not working and work on those aspects more.

For me, it’s working on that pesky head size. It’s always JUST SO SMALL.

WHY IS IT ALWAYS SO SMALL?!

One day I might get it.

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This drawing has been a couple of years in the making. I first encountered the photograph I used as reference during a search for reference material to draw from, although at the time I didn’t have a source for the original photographer. I desperately wanted to draw it though, as I find it an absolutely stunning masterpiece on the reality of bodies, the female form and motherhood. However, my many attempts to recreate the photograph using conventional ink and paper kept frustrating me due to the sheer size of the piece and my inability to get everything done in proportion or even fit it on paper properly.

So when I finally got my computer back and really got some practice and experience in on my Huion Kamvas 22 plus drawing tablet, I decided that the time was never better to finally get this piece off the ground. I’m very pleased with how it has turned out, and my thanks to Sarah Hester, the original photographer. You can find a few other photos from the series this photograph was taken from:

I shall continue to try and focus my attention to drawing bodies that defy our society’s sick infatuation with unattainable beauty standards, and my hat is off to all artists that continue to showcase regular people with regular bodies as well. May you all find success and perhaps one day… one day… we can turn the tide.

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Three drawings in one day is unusual for me, and I paid for it in back pain... But I'm pleased with the results. If only I lived somewhere that had more naturist families for me to use as subject matter. It would be a dream to be the official artist of a naturist club or nude beach. North American nudists just like to hide too much, sadly.

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Promoting family naturism in today's internet age is akin to secretly posting anti-fascism posters in totalitarian countries. It feels like the right thing to do, but is dangerous and puts one on the edge of being eliminated. Maybe not in the life threatening way, but certainly could lead to a loss of income, job, family, peers, etc..

Yet here I am.

I persevere because I believe in it wholeheartedly. Our humanity is DEPENDENT on our connection to our natural selves... And the more we lose THAT, the more we seem to lose... Everything.

The body is out life. Our life is our body. It is not shameful. It is not dangerous. It is not ugly. It is not gross. It is not inherently only a thing of lust and desire. It is all of us.

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Some self portraits from the last 6 years of my body undergoing changes due to circumstances in my life. Aging, work changes, Covid, depression... They and other things have all played a part in my continual and gradual increase in body weight. I've decided it's time to turn that around.

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A few drawings since the last one.

I've been really adamant about standing strong in the face of a huge puritanical attack on nudity over the last couple of years. It's becoming stronger and more ferocious than I've seen it in my lifetime... But the world needs to know and understand that the human body is not scary. It isn't evil. It isn't inherently sexual. It isn't DANGEROUS. To anyone, of any gender, of any age. The more we deny this and hide it and treat it as bad and shameful the more problems we just end up causing ourselves.

This is particularly true when it comes to children and the naked body. Children don't inherently see the naked body as bad. We have to TEACH them that. Also, no adult should ever see a child's naked body and see it in a sexual sense. Yes, this happens, but we can't let an extremely tiny minority of people rule our emotions and reactions. Children, like adults, have bodies. They are beautiful. They are not bad and shameful and evil either. We must protect them, but we have to protect everyone, and hiding children away from the world isn't protecting them... It causes an ironic taboo desire.

I refuse to give in to the puritanical rhetoric. I will continue to draw what I find fun and innocent and beautiful. Sometimes that's adults and sometimes that's youth, and it's all in the sense of artistic aesthetic beauty... And if you have a problem with that, you need to examine your own inner thoughts.

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When last I left you, I was working on drawing images from a 1960s nudist calender, but something happened that put me on a bit of a hiatus from doing... Well... Anything, really.

I suffered a bit of a crisis of, let's say, trust, in a community I was a part of. People that I had come to trust to be forward thinking, honest, and having a strength of conviction regarding the safety of their community turned out to be... Well, not so much that.

It was really heart wrenching to be honest and it REALLY put me on a downward swing. It didn't help that it was the dead of winter and I was already struggling.

Well, I'm beginning to claw back out now. Slowly. This sort of thing doesn't happen overnight.

But the fact that I have a drawing to share today is a minor miracle in itself.

Here I reach for a sun I so desperately crave.

It shall return. I must have faith in this.

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I've been extremely miserable the last few days. Angry. Frustrated. Irritable. I have no real reason why. It came out of nowhere and isn't subsiding. The last three days are generally my best for getting drawing done, but this time around I just did one, and wasn't happy with it at all. I'll share it, as it's not BAD, I just don't like it.

I'm back at work today, but there's a little ball of mood sitting inside me that is threatening to explode. I don't know how to deal with it.

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October 1964 - Part 2

There were 4 figures in total in the October 1964 image. The 4th figure I left out because they were mostly obscured, these two were left. I like the composition of them alone here without the guitar player too.

Not much to say today. We got snow yesterday big time and it just served to make me long for warmer days that much more... But Alas. I'll just have to wait it out.

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October 1964

One of the things that drew me to social nudism was the 'get back to basics' nature of it. For the most part, naked people love to socialize and be active and take part in their environment and their companions. For the most part.

It's a wonderful escape from the hustle of modern life... Where everything is profit and production. Where your only value is in what you can do for someone else.

You obviously don't need nudism for this, but as a community whole, it's different than the vast majority of other communities I've been a part of. While, as with any time groups of people gather, you get drama and conflict, it never seems to be as exaggerated or frequent as it gets elsewhere... But that's also anecdotal to my own experience, so take it with a grain of salt.

Mostly though, just getting away from technology and clothing in nature for awhile works wonders. We need more people with guitars, and less with Bluetooth headsets. We need more people with stories around a fire, and less instagram reels. We need more jumping and splashing in the waves, and less jumping to conclusions on Twitter.