Another Watercolour

Well, the last post seems to have been emoting for posteritiy, because I don't think anyone read it.

Ah well.  The lot of the Lone Blogger.  We can but try - we may be doomed to fail.

We're certainly doomed to fail against this appalling weather - rain, rain, more rain, and then - a spot of rain.  Taking photographs outside, which given my dark flat I need to do, is impossible.  So I have to scan them.  

Scans, however, do not produce high quality results on the whole.  And I've still not got the Ipad to work - because I'm too frightened of the blessed thing to really take it to task.  If this is what old age does to you (relatively speaking old age) who needs it? 

So, scanned photo of my little 12 x 17cm interpretation of a section of the revetment at Ventnor, Isle of Wight.  On Hanhemühle Torchon paper - just about the best I've found for many years, for my particular touch, anyway.

 

Pornography - in its place, OK - out of its place: Not

 I don't have strong views against pornography. I don't object to good, honest smut.

And yet -don't tell me it's art.  It just - on the whole - isn't.  Tom of Finland was an artist - well yes; he was; he used pornography to express something deep within him.

But Tom of Finland was an exception; Robert Mapplethorpe was another.  Are these lines clear?  No - no of course they're not.  Pornography can be be many things; anarchic, revolutionary; disrespectful of a polity that doesn't deserve respect.

It can also be repellently exploitative and voyeuristic.  

I've had more than enough of an artist in digital media posting on Painters-Online, who posts pictures of highly pneumatic women, in a repulsively salivatory representation that affords them no respect at all - it just ogles them, and some stupid people, invasriably men, then trot up to tell us how "beautiful" it is. 

But it's not "beautiful".  It's sexist voyeurism which those who produce it and those who claim to find it beautiful need to grow out of: tabloid newspapers used to present their page 3 "stunnahs", displaying as much respect for women as the worst lech you could seek to find.  

I've no objection to a bit of smut: but sly, dishonest, sneaking, slimy smut, pretending to be something else, is nauseating.  Dirt, not art.  Those who produce it need to grow up beyond the smutty schoolboy stage, and admit their work is - well, shall we say meretricious?  I can think of worse interpretations.

Most of them can do better than this: and they should.