Looking forward to the Festive Season!
From the Artist's Sketchbook
Preview of Volume 2 - Some sketches taken from the sketchbook of Anthony ChristianVolume One available here as an eBook
The Artist and his work
Anthony Christian with (from left to right) "A Hard Dazed Knight","Oedipus Fingers, Oedipus Finx" and "The Crucifixion of the Female Principle"
The LillyEgg Collection
From 1956 - ‘62 I studied by copying in the National Gallery, in London. During those years I found I was repulsed by so many works of violence, from crucifixions to beheadings. I also found myself thinking the place was padded out with good works, but in my opinion, for credibility they all hung on the backs of the few great ones. Those two observations caused me to think how wonderful it would be to have a museum in which there was nothing but the world’s greatest non-violent masterpieces. The germ of an idea was sewn.
In Paris from 1968 – 1988, I studied Erotic Art through what is possibly the largest collection in the world consisting of over 1 million works of Art, from 14th C to date. I not only studied the collection, I found that I so loved the genre I wished from then on to dedicate much of the rest of my life’s work to creating such paintings as might cause Erotic Art to be accepted as completely as Still Life, Landscape or the Nude. I then remembered my earlier museum idea, and thought perhaps I might even create such a museum myself. However, instead of simply painting copies of the original works, as I had vaguely contemplated doing, I would paint erotic versions of them. I have also added many personal touches such as still lifes or portraits of myself and my wife Fanny to the original compositions.Well into the collection by now, I have come to firmly believe that the original Masters approve of my taking their works a step forward in a way that they themselves might well have done, had they not been in fear for their lives even for having such a thought!
None of the works in this Collection is derisive in the slightest; on the contrary, each one is painted with the most enormous respect for the original and the Master who created it.
Anthony Christian
ORGASM
by Anthony Christian
detail from Anthony Christian's "Orgasm"
Salvador Dali's photographic collage "Orgasm"Salvador Dali was his own favourite topic of conversation, he loved nothing more than talking about himself. A very close second, however, was sex, but even that would only be introduced as a subject worth talking about in reference to his own tastes and foibles. He was forever claiming to be impotent and he would loudly list the compensations he created for himself.
On one occasion when I met him, he showed me a collage he had made of photographs he said he had taken of women in orgasm. Since I knew he was very much a voyeur, famous at the St. Regis, the hotel where he lived when he was in New York, for paying the chamber maids large sums to masturbate while he watched, I was not all that surprised, although knowing him as I did I still suspected he had cut out at least a few of the photos from vintage pornographic magazines.
While Dali showed me this collage, he was bewailing the fact that he hadn’t actually painted it, it was “just photographs,” and he hoped one day he might have the time to create such a work. He laughed as he told us how he planned to take “a hundred women all masturbating at once” and paint them in one veritable orgy of a painting.
Whether that was a serious intention of Dali’s or he just enjoyed the fantasy I don’t know, but he never did create such a work. As it happens, over the years erotic art has become one of my favourite subjects to work with and I am always experimenting in that genre. I have found painting erotic collages a truly wonderful experience, both for the challenge it always presents as to the composition, and for the degree to which the beauty of different aspects of sex can be expressed.
Remembering that particular meeting and conversation with Dali, and finding the very collage he had shown me in a book on his work, for the pleasure I knew it would give me but also as a tribute to the memory of the old friend and crazy genius Dali was, I painted this work simply titled “Orgasm.” I enjoyed working on it and like it so much I now consider it as the first of an intended series, which I hope to do to celebrate as many aspects of eroticism as possible; I am not short of ideas already.
Anthony Christian
Trivia: The cows grazing in the top half of the painting are from the artist's home in Yorkshire and the cow in the bottom left hand corner is in the garden of the artist's home in India.
NEW! Erotic Sketchbook - PRINTED edition
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