Jack Vettriano: Romance and Erotica

Jack Vettriano is an artist who's been making quite a name for himself in the art world these days, either as an object of admiration or of scorn. He does narrative pictures that appeal the way that genre fiction appeals. The paintings feature people living a life grander and better than our own, but that we can allow ourselves to enter. I mentioned how Klimt allows his male audience to enter the painting. Notice how Vettriano creates a similar effect for both men and women in this painting. He has placed these ambiguous figures on an endless plain of misty dreamscape. This is typical of his day scenes, which have a quality of nostalgia.

Vettriano's night scenes are entirely different animals, however. I largely think they speak for themselves, but if you'd like I can tease out some of the more luscious features of this work.

Prurient Versions

As I said, at work I’m doing a series on “beautiful at any size,” starting with the thin ones and going up to the zaftigs. I have another series of entries I want to do for Pleasure Domes, but in between, I’m going to produce special versions of my work saying what I really think but can’t say for commercial and/or just general decency reasons.
Gustav Klimt is one of these artists that I learned about in college, not because of my art appreciation class, although he was there, but because I had a girlfriend who was super into him. The only thing is, I can’t remember which it was, because the things I remember being said about him are connect with looking at the art, not at her. I can’t even remember whether it was a serious girlfriend or just a casual short-time thing, but I remember that my feelings about Klimt come from this girl.
The secret to Klimt's enduring popularity is his ability to take the internal life of his figures and project it into an external image. Klimt works with bright colors and abstract shapes to create a visual image of the emotional state felt by the people he represents. His most popular image is also his most extreme in this regard. In The Kiss, Klimt reduces his human figures to their absolute minimum, in terms of realistic representation. We see their hands, their faces, a shoulder, some feet, mostly focusing on the areas of intense awareness during the moment of kissing. Oddly, Klimt actually does something similar to porn, which is, I guess, a fundamental characteristic of the male gaze, he almost erases the male figure. The man’s face is hidden, while the woman looks out at us. Oddly, too, although the emotions in the picture are of a passionate, lip-to-lip kiss, the man is actually kissing her on the cheek. Why? Because this frees her lips to be puckered at us, so that we as male viewers can place ourselves in the picture as kissing her, feeling her hands, her shoulder, the warmth of her flesh on our flesh as the two bodies dissolve into warmth that almost interdiffuses.
When Klimt does portray a more complete human figure, as in this detail from Sea Serpents, it is most likely a waify, almost emaciated woman, the sort of person we might mistake for the anorexic actress, and it shows how women with a bad body image can imagine they are overweight even when they are deathly thin. In a body of this size, any amount of fat can look out of proportion, such as the woman's thigh. But Klimt shows us this woman is comfortable, so secure that the strength of her eyes challenges us to enter the roiling sea of her emotion. Her expression really is what makes this picture, it’s a don’t-you-dare expression that also says, dare, dare, dare.
Klimt also shows us in this Portrait of Emile Floge that proportion can be easily maintained with the proper clothing, clothes that give volume and femininity to a slender frame. I love the scarf that gives volume to the neck, the puffy sleeves that make the arms appear more fleshy. Good stuff.

Whoring on the Cheap

I've been riding the 15 and 15L east Colfax buses in Denver pretty much every day for almost three months now, and I've seen a lot of things. In the back of the bus, it's not unusual for people to pass around bottles of beer or whiskey. One sad SoB gets on the bus every day with a big can of Milwaukee's Best in a brown paper bag. He drinks the beer over about the first half of the ride, then passes out from the alcohol. Kissing, fondling, fighting, it's all pretty standard fare, and almost none of it gets you kicked off.

Nor, apparently, does picking up a prostitute. Actually, the guy had picked her up before they got on the bus together to ride to the motel or whatever. How do I know she was a working girl? Well, I don't know, but she wore the uniform: short, stretchy, red skirt (slightly worn), big hoop earrings, heavy face makeup, runny black tights, and very high heels. I've seen her around before, and this seems to be her normal outfit. She also hangs around a lot outside of Kitty's East.

But this is the first time I've seen her with a john. He was a big guy, call him John Candy. The two of them got on the bus, and John sits down in the last available seat, letting this little girl, who looked like she was barely legal at best and lived on a diet of meth and menthols, stand. Then a gentleman offered her a seat next to John, which she took. The two of them rode together in absolute silence, not making eye contact, like a weird parallel dimension version of The Graduate, for about 15 minutes. Then she stood, told him the next stop was theirs, and they got off.

Weird.

It happened yesterday

It was a windy day in downtown Denver. I saw a woman walking in a dark outfit. Black, double-breasted wool coat, short wool skirt, mid-thigh length, in a large plaid pattern of black and brown, some tassels. A wraparound. Her hair was up, tight, in a bun. Her step was prim, measured but quick on her long, slender black heels. Black tights, black hair, she was a fine black line against the grey faux marble of the post office.

Then the wind kicked up and played in her skirt as the wind will do with any wraparound. Panicked, she fought to keep it down, but the wind blew fiercely, its fingers loosening the strands of her hair from the bun, and I could see her slowly giving in to the raw power of nature, something in her rising to its primal call. It enrapt and unwrapped her with its passion, and she succumbed, lifting her hands, smiling, tossing her head to let her hair trail free behind her.

And I, sitting in my car, a simple machine, pure prosthesis of my body, saw that the light had changed. I pushed the clutch in deep, thrust the knob forward and felt the barely-lubricated gears enmesh with rough strife. The gas pedal goes down, reaching back into the engine to pull the throttle lever. The mouth of the carburetor opens, gasping, gasping. The engine surges faster and faster, four flat cylinders bucking wet with oil thin from heat and friction. RPMs go up, the valves roar, roar, roar as I race through the intersection. Then the clutch goes deep again, the engine sighs, and she is gone. I do not look in the rear view mirror.

She's Got Legs

In a new, but hopefully continuing feature, we offer the following guest column:

In the days when cinematic skin on display was in short supply and America was young and innocent, much attention was paid to a great pair of “gams.“ But the legs seem unappreciated these days. In recent years, I’ve spent a fair amount of time in a particular bar with a certain group of gentlemen, appraising waitresses well-known for their various…endowments, yet little time was devoted to the legs. Being a well-known and self-admitted “ass man,” why do I spend so little time pondering the legs that are carrying these asses around? It’s a mystery.A quick web search reveals that legs are still well-appreciated by some. The “celebrity legs hall of fame” has recently inducted the lovely Kate Beckinsale:Yes, those are nice legs. Notice how the boot accentuates that vast and shapely terrain, with the eye traveling up and over the knee and along the thigh. On those occasions when we did discuss legs in the aforementioned bar, they were often clad in nearly knee-high boots. Boots and skirts…that was a combination we were particularly fond of. But a very short skirt, without boots, sometimes leads to less focus on the leg itself and more pondering of what is under the skirt.Maybe I just haven’t spent enough time among the right female crowd to gain adequate appreciation. Our leggiest friend moved away too soon. But looking at Kate Beckinsale, I want to learn more. Maybe start at the bottom of the legs and work my way up. Eventually I’d reach places that, to me, are more interesting, but I think the long journey would be worthwhile in itself.

--Name and address withheld

Noses

I've noticed that most of the time poets describe a woman's face they leave her nose out of it. For example, Byron, in "She Walks in Beauty," describes the gal's cheeks and eyes and of course her smile. Shakespeare generally talks about his "woman"'s eyes and cheeks and lips, which is pretty conventional. Even the Song of Solomon, such a wonderfully diverse description, with lines like "Thy teeth are alike a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing, whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them," has pretty much nothing to say about the nose. I guess the conventional wisdom is that the best that can be hoped for in a woman's nose it that it go unnoticed.

Not so! A woman's nose is one of the places that her face becomes unique, that it really gets its character. If I may again be allowed to call attention to Scarlett Johansson:

This is not necessarily the best picture of her because she's not smiling, but it's advantageous because you can see her nose is, well, a little bulbous. It's part of what makes her so adorable, and, more than that, it makes her seem so real, so normal, so approachable, although I probably wouldn't dare. I guess the rumors are that she has had her nose done to make it a little smaller. These rumors are pretty ridiculous, in general, but I can't ever say for sure.

But it wasn't Scarlett's nose that made me think of this topic. I've been on kind of a nose kick lately, noticing a lot of attractive women with kind of off noses on the bus or whatnot. And I can't say exactly what it is about them that draws me to their faces, but I think the answer might be in the woman whose nose I really noticed, the one that kicked this whole thing off, I think.

Hanging around with (Dr.) Nog one evening we had a few beers and watched a grindhouse trailer compilation. One actress who did a lot of these ragged-edge productions was Christina Lindberg. Her most famous movie is They Call Her One Eye, which Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill. But she was also a Playmate, and really considered a great beauty for her day. Here's a picture of her that captures what, I think, made her affect me:

per my blog action day post, she's a, well, a natural woman. )cringe( Seriously, though, she's wearing mascara, and probably many other cosmetics, but look at her face. Not only her nose, which is obviously sizeable, but also the lines on her face, natural lines around her eyes and nose and mouth that make her face seem soft, like the petals of a flower just unfolded from inside the calyx. It's part of what made her such a great pick for exploitation films. She became an icon of corrupted innocence.

Consider this pic, as well:

Just natural beauty in soft light, beauty engrossed in beauty, looking at the flower, breathing its sweetness.

And this quality can transfer to other contexts as well. Consider this picture from Huge Real Boobs:

Although this pic, chosen partly to comply w/ my 70s PG self-rating, does not display the combination of her nose and smile that make her so winning, I hope you can see what they do. They make her seem real, and though I don't know whether her boobs are real or not (and I'm not sure "huge" is the size adjective I'd choose, either), I feel that they are, because I feel that she is real. Because of the imperfections of her nose.

Why Guys Like Porn

Okay, so this may seem obvious and some of it is.

The main reason guys like porn is that it's easy. We're lazy, and bedding a woman is a lot of work, especially if you're starting from scratch at the bar or wherever. If you're lucky, you might stumble on a woman looking for a revenge fuck for her cheating hubby and you just happen to be chosen. But for the most part, you're mostly just gonna get her number. Then you gotta call her, plan a date, go on the date, not make any mistakes (either coming on too strong and looking like a desperate creep or not strong enough and seeming like you've got no testosterone), and maybe get a kiss. A guy I know who went to strip clubs described them as "cheaper than a date, and with a lap dance." Two, three, four dates (months?) later and what're you at, second base?

And if you've already got a woman in bed, it's not that much easier. First there's your schedule, and her schedule, and her "schedule" to juggle. And then there's the whole "mood" issue, which is as bad as a date. Come on too strong and she's not ready yet, or not strong enough and all you get is a cuddle. Or you might've worked up a good wheedle that generally gets you what you want, but makes you feel low anyway.

Whereas porn you just have to hit "play."

And then there's the simple fact that the women in porn are not the women in your life. They're numerous and different, stimulating for the simple fact that they're another woman you get to see naked.

But the main reason guys like porn is something beyond this, something deep and emotional, a real need guys feel that porn generally answers better than most flesh-and-blood women. I discovered it as a result of a chance find that I like to talk about, so I'll repeat here, even though the two or three people who read this blog already know it.

One cold winter morning I was coming home from a long, grueling graveyard shift at the ghetto 7-11 where I worked, and though it was after 7am it was still dark. Garbage day. The dumpster full as I walked down the alley to the back entrance to my apartment building. But there, beside the dumpster, a huge stack, 3 feet tall, of magazines. It only took one glance to know they were porn, so I scooped up a huge armful and went inside, suddenly warmed.

It turned out to be Hustlers, some of the Barely Legal variety. Although I don't like Flint's politics or humor, the porn is not bad at all. And in one of the Barely Legals there was a photoplay of a man and woman having sex on a streetcar. One of the shots, which is burned into my memory, was a closeup of the woman about to give the man a blowjob (I think at the time they weren't allowed to show actual genital-genital or genital-lip contact). I don't remember much about the things you associate with a blowjob, the lips or the cheeks. What I remember is her eyes. They were wide, mediterranean blue eyes, and their expression could only be described as worshipful.

The cliche goes that men love women for who they are, while women love men for who they could be. And a consequence of that is that women often remind us of just how far off that ideal we are. Porn women don't do that.

Oh, sure, they may say "harder" or "faster," but it's by way of encouragement, not in a needling way, and when they get it harder or faster, they say "oh, yeah."

Part of the problem is that most of us guys aren't really worshippable material: we're not Adonises, or whatever. But most of the guys I know worship the women in their lives, and they're no Venuses. We're not asking for it all the time, maybe just (half?) an hour every couple of days. And if we got that, there'd be a lot less demand for porn.