Love’s highest moment and visual arts are not the best of friends. Landscapes, still lifes, portaits, battles, myth, religious themes? Oh, those are siamese twins to drawing or painting. But each time a painter would want to talk about passion and sex, it would come out either erotic or purely pornographic.
Please don’t mention the genre of nudes (or some Mars embracing some Venus who would always look at the viewer of the painting, and not the Mars), for it is as much related to love, as going to a strip club is to securing agreement to a first date with someone whom you really fall for.
Love, sex, orgasm. The highest moment when the two beings are as one. How do you really paint it without resorting to erotism, to the seduction of the viewer? We can’t really force our brain to switch off all our sex-related assoications and desires while we watch people having sex, even though some yoga gurus say we can. To achieve that enlightened state of mind we’d have to look at those pictures with our bodies twisted up in impossible positions, and we can’t have this kind of behaviour in art galleries, can we?
Well, that’s how it can be done. This is a pastel by Sevostianov, whom you’ve probably met a couple of times before in this blog (1 and 2, and if you missed those, I promise you’d enjoy watching the pics and reading the text).
The main trick here is very simple. The artist removed the lines separating the faces of these lovers. He showed them AS ONE, melting in the embrace into almost a single being.
This trick makes it a picture about love, sex, and orgasm, but instead of the butterflies in your stomach it gives you some dolphins in your head. For your thoughts about love start graciously surfacing up and playing through the gray matter of the brain. They light up who knows how many neural networks safeguarding your associations with perfect love, for which the orgasm is just the crown of a beatiful relationship. And not something you forget in the morning or regret the whole life after.
I could write some more about this simple pastel, but… I think I want you to enjoy it for youself.
PS I don’t think this post should be marked as something suitable for grown-ups only, but if it should – let me know first, before pressing the button that the Reader is unobtrusively offering to consider next to the blogger’s name, you know… The one about the mature character of a post )
Standing Ovation, Seated 