Alex Dewars: Figure Painter

Thursday, 26 September 2013

Edinburgh Art Fair 2013, and beyond.

Monday, 22 July 2013

The Nude versus the Naked.

Above are 2 paintings I created for my Degree Show 10 years ago. The purpose was to show the fine line between trashy, pornographic images and fine art images of the nude throughout western history.

The results were to be deliberately inconclusive.

I believe any Artist or art lover worth their salt should reading the following texts, Kenneth Clark's "The Nude" and John Berger's "Ways of Seeing". (Also Lynda Nead's The Female Nude and Wendy Steiner's "The Trouble with Beauty are worth a punt.) Each text is from a different era and a different perspective of the Nude in Art, some of which are contradictive but no less valid.

So it would appear the Scholars are inconclusive.

Add to the pot that the cultural landscape has changed so much even in the 10 years since i graduated let alone during the 50's when Clark penned his theories, muddies the water even further.

When I graduated my work was meant to point a finger at the "Lads Mags" for creating the "Centrefold complex" where men are only cable of chasing unobtainable photoshopped ideas of what women should look like.

Today's generation have a similar dilema. The Fetishized world of the internet.

Today, on the day the world watched the Princess's vagina, David Cameron's goverment addressed the issue. David Cameron saw a world where people where unable to make distinctions between sex and violence and worse a world where we are unable to teach our children the difference between sex and violence. In "1984" The Ministry of Love produced Pornography to placate the proletariat, In liberal mulitcultural, multisexual 2013, Cameron took it away.

In an incredible string of vaguarities Cameron makes no distinction of what pornography is, endangering anything that could be vaguely seductive. Its clear that Cameron is targeting the deep dark recesses of the internet that produce images that some of us will never see, But his proposition will only push sexuality into the dark recesses, new generation of Objectivist could breed further under his regime, Hans Belmer's Puppets come to mind. A artist unable to form any relationship with a woman or indeed person which resulted in the creation of fetishized disembodied puppets.

Cameron is not impressed with our Childrens Sexual development......Ofcourse he didnt follow up this announcement with any details of reforming Sex Ed' in schools......Missed a trick there David.