Felix d'Eon - Gay Artist of the Male Nude How long have you been painting the male nude? I have been painting the male nude since I was 12 years old, and began copying old master paintings in books of mythology, especially the male nude art by Michelangelo and Ingres. It did not take me long to discover the beauty of real naked men in the flesh, especially when I read about the old masters drawing from life, so I started drawing myself nude in the mirror, and drawing my twin brother in the nude as well. I was soon drawing my fellow students, whom I would paint nude in my bedroom, and other members of the swim team my brother and I were on, who were very comfortable with nudity and being naked anyway. Plus I lived in Pacific Palisades, and my friends and I were always skinny dipping in each others pools in the summer - where and when I grew up, nudity was no big deal, and my life long practice of stripping all my friends naked and drawing and painting them started then. My long career as a gay male artist started before I even realized myself that I was gay! Did you study to be a nude male artist? Yes - my mother enrolled me in junior college when I was 15, and when my aptitude became clear. She was very supportive, and didn't mind that I had naked boys around the house all the time. She also hired nude models for me so I could study at home after school - I loved drawing my friends naked (and naturally, I had alterior motives!) but there is nothing like a professional nude model, who is practiced in holding hard poses and holding still. When I was 16 I ran away from home with my twin brother, and we lived in Mexico City for almost a year. While we were there, we met an older man who did nude male gay art, and homoerotic art. He was a very talented artist, and he took us in to live with him. We cleaned his house, cooked meals, and modeled nude for him every day. He was pretty focused on erotic and even pornographic art - mine and my brother's penis was always the center of attention - but his technique was good, and I learned a lot just watching him draw and paint, plus, he had cute boys over all the time, and he encouraged everyone to just hang out naked, so I did lots of drawings then, of the naked boys all around, and studies after his large collection of homoerotic art - and straight up dick art, to be honest. Later, I went to the Academy of Art University here in San Francisco, where the focus was on technique and learning to draw the nude, especially the male nude. I practiced and drew every day, and my life-long habit of getting my friends naked for me continued. It was a grueling school - 6 hours of live nude drawing and painting every day, constant art making, and hours every night with my friends sitting naked for me afterwards, or else me drawing myself naked in the mirror when no models were to be had! Thats interesting that you draw your friends so compulsively. Do you think of your art as being a sort of diary? Exactly! Or at least, in part. A large part of what I do is drawings and paintings of people, friends, and boyfriends that I love and have spent so much time with in my life. I do lots of portraits, and studies of people laying around my house or their houses, and I do think of it as being sort of like a diary. They are usually nude because I like to draw the body so much - and because I am such a nudist! I always encourage people to shed their clothes when they walk in my house. And the art on the walls - tons and tons of male nudes - I think has an encouraging effect. The act of drawing a naked boy is not like that of Photography - it takes time, and as a result the drawing is a record of that time - of my thoughts, our conversation, my warm and emotional feeling towards the friend or lover in question, my appreciation for their physical beauty, in their gorgeous nudity. For me, a drawing is a record not just of a particular body but also of that whole process of time, all of which I can remember. But that is just part of what I do. The drawings in the Figure Drawings gallery, all the male nude art in there, was drawn this way, from a live naked boy, over a process of time, and with our engagement with one another (which could never happen if I was drawing nude men from a photograph). And what is the other part of the work that you alluded to? Well, I am also very interested in mysticism, in history, in myth and mythology. And in antique illustrations. My work draws in all of these themes, but always in reference to my homosexuality - a gay mysticism, gay history, gay myth and mythology. I often feel that my feelings, emotions, and desires are not sufficiently represented, and so my work is an attempt to discover that in these themes and address it. But always through a lens of sensuality - the hook to draw the viewer in. That is why I use the male nude so much - for the beauty and sensuousness of the gay and male body, as a lure, as a vision, and often, as a beautiful end in itself. I think because of my own Mexican and European heritage, I draw on Greek and Roman traditions of art, literature, myth and their hidden traditions of homoerotic and same-sex love, as well as those of my Mexican, and especially Aztec, heritage. And the Illustration? Oh - I love old illustrations. But illustrations as we generally think of them are always meant for a straight audience - I love them so much, so I am making new-old illustrations which correspond to my own sensibilities. Plus I think its a little perverse - a little sexy - to fill images drawn in the style of old-time illustrations (especially children's book illustrations!) with beautiful naked men and boys, with stories that were not allowed to be told for so long, and even with hard-core porn and erections. Full frontal, so to speak. So you aren't worried about being known as a maker of gay erotica, even porn? No - not at all! I have had a couple of patrons write me worried emails, concerned that my more overtly pornographic and erotic gay drawings and paintings would affect my credibility as an artist. I think thats absurd. Courbet famously painted a close-up a woman's vagina and called it "The Birth of the World" and that hardly affected his reputation as an artist. Michelangelo devoted his life to painting only the male nude, and he was only the most famous example to do so. Hokusai, the greatest of the Ukio-e artists of Japan, painted a large number of gorgeous pornographic images, which are among the most celebrated in all his ouvre. Plus, these are not the fifties. All kinds of famous young artists make artwork a great deal more explicit than mine - Carolee Schneemann pulled a scroll out of her vagina, live, and that was in 1975! I think the idea that it would be a problem is outdated. So do you think of it as gay erotica? I don't know. Am I a gay artist? Is it gay art? Of course! It would be absurd to deny it. I paint images of beautiful naked men - fulfilling, in my mind, Matisse's famous dictum - art should be like a comfortable armchair. I make work for a purpose - to fulfill a need that has been suppressed for so long. And I feel very lucky to have been born at just the moment when making this kind of work is so easy, without the scandal and oprobation that would have attended it for so long. Painting gay art does not carry the scandal it once did. Which removes a little of its sexiness, perhaps, but which has certainly made my life easier. That said, I really just think of myself as an artist, and while my artwork is clearly gay art and is intended as such for a particular audience, I draw with a beautiful technique, and make gorgeous images, which I think can appeal to anyone. And what place does the fully erotic, the pornographic, have in your gay art? I often draw my lovers in a state of arousal - for my own pleasure. I keep the most intimate and personal - the ones of the boys I loved the most - but I sell the rest, and I will ask my more charming and exhibitionist models to pose for homoerotic, well, pornographic drawings with some regularity. There is nothing more beautiful, and I feel very lucky that I know so many beautiful men who share something so intimate with me - and really, with all of my patrons as well. The rest are inspired by Hokusai as I said above (he did straight porn), and a feeling that a beautiful and frankly erotic gay picture can have all of the artistry - and perhaps a little more charge! of something less, um, erect. Plus, also as I said before, these kinds of images, done in a beautiful, visually arresting way, are not something that is terribly common (most pornographic art is totally without art, as it were, but is done quickly and cheaply and is totally tacky). I want to celebrate the body and sex, and gay sex in particular, in the most beautiful, loving way. What place does male nude photography have in your work? And what is its relationship to your painting? I think of myself as an artist in the traditional sense of painting and drawing. Photography is something I came to late, and I usually think of it as a tool. Most of the artwork on the website were done from life - the live naked man sitting in front of me. I much prefer to work that way. But it can be very expensive. I pay my models around 15 an hour, and it takes several hours to make a drawing, which in part explains the relatively high prices. With a photo, however, that whole process is simplified, and made cheaper. Starting a few years ago, I started taking photos of naked men to assist in making drawings more cheaply. Now, I mostly sell drawings done from photographs of my cute naked boyfriends on ebay (since I can sell them for a lower price - its more democratic that way), and higher priced drawings done from live models on my website or ebay store. There are lots of reasons why I work with live naked boys, and not just with photos - for one thing, I think the drawings done with live nude models are higher quality. The drawings take more time, and more effort - you can see faint lines where I am searching for the right proportions of the model. This is lacking in a drawing of a naked man drawn from a photograph. Also, in a photo, all the decisions are already made for me. I can't have the model move slightly, or rearrange the light to bring out his abs, or change my mind about the direction of his gaze. And of course, its a lot more fun to have a live naked gay boy in the studio than a photo. We get to have a conversation, have an experience, which you don't have with a photo. And if he's a lover, well, the pleasures multiply! And of course, I am a traditionalist, and drawing from life is the way my heroes did it, the old masters whom I have spent so much time studying. What else do you do with gay male photography? Well, I am starting to think of it as an art for its own sake, and am learning more about photography. I expect the male nude to feature more as photography in my work. But I also just have a really great life - my studio is full of beautiful naked gay boys, fantastically erotic things are constantly unfolding before my eyes, I travel all over the world, and ask locals and other tourists to pose for me, and I arrange skinny dipping events with my friends at beaches and rivers around Tennessee and Northern California, not to mention all the sexy naked boys at the festivals I go to, like Burning Man and the Haven, and it would be criminal not to carry a camera in tow. So it, too, is like a diary. In fact, I keep a blog and diary on my website, where I post photos of all the beautiful boys and our naked adventures to share with my friends and patrons. I do this because its fun, because I think of my life as being itself a work of art (all this fun is a concerted effort at finding beauty wherever I am, and going out of my way to travel where it is, or call it into being where it is not), and also as a generous offer to share with my collectors, as a thank you, since I don't actually make any money taking these photos or posting these experiences. Do you use the gay male art photos you take for your diary as fodder for your art? I didn't used to - everything was done from live nude male models, as a matter of principle. The experience and the memories of the experience themselves were the inspirations - the photos were just a byproduct. But recently I started using some of these photos I have taken over the years as the basis on which to build paintings. This has allowed me to make smaller, more affordable male nude paintings in full color, and the results have been pleasing. But where possible, I prefer to use the live male nude. Do you paint other subjects than the male nude? I do, in fact, have pieces other than male nude art. But clearly, the beautiful male nude is the overriding theme. However, when I travel I frequently draw and paint landscapes, and I love painting people with beautiful and stylish clothes, and indigenous people in hand-made clothing. I don't post these to my websites, though, since they tend not to sell, and do them purely for personal satisfaction. But in the end I am always drawn to the beauty of the male nude, and I tirelessly revisit that favorite theme again and again. What kinds of media do you use for your naked male art? For live male nude drawings, I usually hand-prepare blue or white paper with ground pastel powder, and draw in graphite, with pastel and gouache highlights. I also use this technique for some of the smaller drawings I do for ebay done from the nude male photographs I take. I work in watercolor on white and colored paper, pastel, oil, acrylic, and for my illustrations, watercolor and ink on rice paper. I am very experimental, and mix and play with techniques quite often. Who are your models, and how do you find them? I draw all kinds of guys - my tastes are very democratic. I am definitely skewed towards the younger, skinnier side of things though. My models are mostly my friends, but its a bit of a catch-22 - they are often my friends because I wanted to draw them before I had met them. They tend to be around my age, give or take a decade (I'm 29). I like all kinds of bodies - skinny boys, muscular men, and all combinations thereof, but my one requirement in a model is that they have a flat belly. All thought not even that is a hard and fast rule. I am constantly on the lookout for cute and interesting models - boys on the street, in yoga, at dance class, at the gym, on the beach, anywhere and everywhere! I walk right up to anyone who catches my eye and ask if they would like to pose, always with my latest sketchbook in hand. They are always polite, and flattered, even if they say no, but I live in San Francisco, the most liberal city in the world, and they usually say yes (especially if they are gay). And often, we become friends while they model for me - so many hours of conversation together, and in such a state of naked intimacy, has its effect! Plus I draw all my boyfriends, lovers and friends, and insist that just about everyone I know remove their clothes for me at least once. Do you show your gay male art in a gallery? No, I don't. I have thought about it in the past, but galleries take a 50 percent commission, and I sell my work for what it is worth at the moment - I could not settle for half the amount. A gallery would therefore double the amount an image sells for, which means I would have to double the prices on ebay and my website, and that does not seem fair to my supporters and patrons. So I have turned down a few galleried interested in the art of the male nude, because it did not seem practical. Plus, I make a living on ebay and my website with my gay art and have no need of dealing with or depending upon a gallery - another reason it is so lucky to be a gay artist today!