Erotic Art Making : Letting Loose my Inner Creative Vixen

It was a couple of years ago when it first occurred to me to draw and make art using the nude female form. I sat down with a picture I saw in a magazine and followed the lines as best I could. I called it, The Three Fates.

When a friend saw it, she straight away asked how much and bought it before the paint was barely dry.

I've played here and there with the female nude since then with baby steps toward erotically charged art. There is much wonder around the human body, it's exquisite shape and form, particularly the female shape with it's sensual curves.

Erotic art, on the other hand, hovers on the boundaries of perceived indecency. Being more sexually explicit, erotic art can be deemed offensive or deviant depending on the art and who is viewing and critiquing the art. What is obscene to one viewer may be provocative to another.

An artist friend recently loaned me this book on erotic art. It is a huge volume with oversized pages. It has hundreds of pictures and illustrations of erotica from many time periods. Our obsession with sexual pleasure and passion has always been present. To be human is to be sexual. (I know, obvious, right? Otherwise, how were you born ?)

I have been trepidatious about exploring erotic art making. Some of that is good old-fashioned creative insecurity. Can I make good erotic art? (whatever good means, because art is so subjective.) The other reason I have felt hesitation is in regard to my existing audience, modest as it may be, I do not want to offend or upset any of my students or patrons.

"But Mom, you're an artist. People will like that you're scandalous," counseled my wise-beyond-her-years twenty-something year old daughter. "Make what you're gonna make and don't worry about it."

She is right of course.

I suspect that the resistance I've carried about making erotic art is because of my own judgements about sex and being a sexual woman. What if I make art that is really steamy or edgy and my patrons get turned off thinking I'm too much of a hussie?

This anxious thought is rooted very deep into the time of my life when I was a young woman exploring my sexual nature. Some called me a slut at that time. Oh, high school ! There is a residue of shame that still lingers at times like a lost little girl ghost who can't find her way home.

My Wise Sage Self counsels my inner teenage slut to be at peace...to let go of cultural and societal shaming of a young woman who was discovering her sexuality with an enthusiasm that was unpermittable for women in my youth. I love on my teenaged slutty self letting her know that she was not bad.

Maybe part of why I feel the unrelenting pull to focus on erotic art making is that my inner slut needs to be heard and seen.

So for better or worse, I'm turning loose my inner slutty creative vixen to paint whatever her depraved heart wants to paint. I have a feeling that as I stay in this flow rather than resist it, that more doors for erotic art making are going to open for me. At the very least, the doors within my own creative and erotic imagination.