MARY
Drawings of nudes from the internet.
I always wanted to do nudes. I really like nudes in painting, and almost never in photography. So I tried to think of how I could make something that I might like. I had been working on various things for about five years, since the photographing part of the ALVA project was finished. I took lots of photographs of lovers, rude pictures, I printed some, drew some, painted on some. All sorts of things. But none of these worked at all.
I like watching pornography for the same reasons as I like the photos with radiators in them on Tinder. There seems to me to be a huge amount of ex-formation in pornography, as there is in jokes and things (David Foster Wallace wrote a great thing about jokes in Franz Kafka which I have forgotten now because I gave all my books away, I think it is in Consider the Lobster). For a long time I made screen grabs of pornos but could never find anything that seemed very interesting. Pornography now is not as interesting as it was twenty years ago.
I was talking to a friend about these things and she suggested I should try out ‘Chaturbate’ which is kind of like skype but you pay to watch people do sexual things to themselves, instead of feeling uncomfortable and having nothing to say to your lover. You can watch it for free but if you want to see specific sex items you have to pay. There is a menu at the bottom of the page and you select which thing you like to look at most and give the person money. The person that I watched was called Mary. She was a masters graduate of psychology and her thing was that she was hairy. This was the only thing I didn’t like about Mary, that she had a thing. But often she shaved the thing off, for money.
I decided that I should really participate in this, I was taking a lot of screen grabs and drawing them and printing them so I thought perhaps it would be better, morally, ethically, to ask and to pay. So I asked her to lie like the Manet Olympia in the painting that I saw when I was little and fell in love with. She thought it was strange that she didn’t have to piss on anything or come or anything like that. I paid one hundred bit-coins for her to do this. I think it was around twenty pounds. She did it for a few moments and I snapped some pictures. Then I drew them, this is what you can see here.
I liked these better than any of the other things that I had made to do with nudes until this point.
Click on the photographs, some are parts of little sets. Some are not, so there is only one of them.
