A ton of work, refining the proportions and contours. Which, sometimes means shifting and redoing a leg, hand, arm, or foot up to several times; including re-triangulating the points within them. I hope that refining them now, will save me months or years in the painting process. I plan to finish refining his right leg and foot, already today I have shifted them three or four times.
Have you been thinking about the difference between love and sex? There is also the related question of the difference between art and porn.
Love has been a theme of mine since 1984 with the painting Pursuit. My first art teacher, Edgar Ewing, told our university fine art class on the first day, “Art is like making love.” I was seventeen at the time. I remember clearly the beautiful sparkle in his eyes of how magical love and art were to him. I already knew that part of the feeling from making art.
I have revisited the theme of love in art for decades, but it is now that I understand its importance in the psychology of human evolution; that came about from writing my book, Evolution Through Art. The stylized eroticism of the Venus sculptures, going back 30,000 years, plays an epic role in our human development. The combination of eroticism and art created new pathways integrating emotion, senses, and thought. This integration of pathways catapulted the human species beyond animal comprehension to achieve the ability to imagine and implement future outcomes. Instead of acting moment by moment, humans could anticipate problems days, months, and years in advance and plan accordingly.* This wasn’t limited to only thinking, but included imagining how something would feel in the future, as well as the emotional rewards in a successful outcome.
Imagine a hunter with a Venus in his bag, taking the sculpture out and feeling her endowments, and knowing that in a few days, on his return, he could have the real thing. The Venus sculptures are tiny, some are merely 3″, and they have been found far away from where their material came from, indicating they were transported.
I am a humanist, and look at sexuality as a natural part of every human’s experience. It is still intensely personal, but universal at the same time. But it is love that elevates sexuality. It is not about technique, hormones, or porn. The way I experience love is as a bliss state—an overload of senses, admiration, and beauty.
Aristotle was very careful in discussing Eudaemonia, a state human flourishing, with its moments of bliss that are an end in itself, he realistically understood that life can be hard and horrible. And that some people may have such terrible circumstances that they will not feel bliss. His view is that they can at least have their nobility. Art is different than a recording a reality, for good or bad. An artist can push the limits of ideals, for instance, bliss, make it feel real, and capture it forever. An artist can take an ideal state as end in itself, and immortalize it, as the artwork is not dependent on the process of living and dying.
Aristotle’s genius of eudaemonia was how it inspires creativity, effort, family, romance, solutions, achievements, and values. And once experienced we get to stop for a moment and soak in that we are living the good life. It is an epic psychological and practical insight.
For the human me, aside from painting, the bliss feeling of making love is as high as it gets. It feels like the sublime experience, and at the same time, like the most simple, normal, and ordinary thing—as if it is the way life should be.
Yesterday, I manipulated the hell out of a beautiful photo of the Milky Way, and I will use it as the background for the couple.
Lastly, I solved a metaphysical problem in having the lovers making love in in outer space. In real life they would fry or freeze, and suffocate. I will very subtly suggest they are floating inside an enormous glass enclosure. It wont’ be windows or portals, but just the hint of a great sheet glass.
I will see how much detail I can get in the drawing before transferring it to the much larger canvas. Each head is less than a inch square, not much space to elaborate.
Michael, Idyllwild, June 25, 2022
Frame of References:
*Rand, Ayn. The Romantic Manifesto.
Metaphysics—the science that deals with the fundamental nature of reality—involves man’s widest abstractions. It includes every concrete he has ever perceived, it involves such a vast sum of knowledge and such a long chain of concepts that no man could hold it all in the focus of his immediate conscious awareness. Yet he needs that sum and that awareness to guide him—he needs the power to summon them into full, conscious focus.
That power is given to him by art.
Moore, Catherine, Psychologist, MBA. What is Eudaimonia? Aristotle and Eudaimonic Wellbeing. https://positivepsychology.com/eudaimonia/