I’d also like to announce that the book In Her Own Image, a 316 page collection of self-portraits from 87 women of all different ages, nationalities and artistic styles, is now available for purchase! 8 of my self-portraits are included! Read more about this >here<.

I came across Natalie’s work a few years ago when I first joined Flickr. I’d been watching the evolution of her work for a while before approaching her, as well as enjoying her writings (just as an example, I heart and second what she says about Narcissism in this text, among many others). Since the beginning I was hooked by Natalie’s continued efforts in self-portraiture, showing an intelligent, liberated -and beautiful- woman with control over her body and image. I favor beauty in contemporary visual arts and I admire a woman who takes power of her own image, regardless of all the criticism she can get for sharing -nude or not nude- artistic pictures of herself. Natalie has also a keen sense of the audience, reflected in her consistently appealing imagery, yet it’s not all just plain ‘trickery’ like the one populating sites like Flickr. There is brains and guts to it.

The ideas for our collaboration came mostly from the shared concern and feeling of impotence towards issues like the disdain for -nude or not nude- female self-portraiture , the omnipresence of gender stereotypes and censorship -specially of women’s nipples. The images created are ‘commentaries’ on these issues, perhaps useless as various Flickr users have remarked, but to me all art is ‘useless’. Furthermore, we’d both been previously inspired by Balthus, which led to  “The Artists’ Sketch” . This image in particular didn’t quite result as I first imagined, mainly because we had to take the shots in a hurry. Natalie had to catch her plane back to Brighton on time! We spent several days afterwards both tweaking the image in Photoshop, until we finally decided for the semi-drawing version. But here’s another version you haven’t seen (click to enlarge):

There’s a non-Flickr version of “Booby Traps” on it’s way (for those who didn’t notice, the color of the tassels comes from the Flickr logo), in the meantime I’d also like to share the black and white version of “Pathetic Phallacy”, which I very much like (click to enlarge):

During the course of the photoshoots we took individual portraits of each other, so I have the material to create a couple of paintings with her as the model in the near future. I was very happy to have the opportunity to work with Miss Aniela. Thanks to Natalie and my agent Julie for making this collaboration possible!

Hope you enjoyed the results of our work! :) Read more in >Natalie’s blog post<.

I just joined “Behance Network, creative portfolios, projects and collaborations”. Behance is the “Official Community Partner” of the 13th annual Webby Awards, the leading international award honoring excellence in interactive design, creativity, usability and functionality on the Internet. Indeed, looks very professional and much more open to diversity. I’ve been browsing there for a couple of hours and I’ve already found more than just a few very interesting painters, illustrators, photographers and designers! More importantly,  artists are free to upload their projects without an invisible hand censoring the slightest appearance of a nipple.

I do hope, however, that one day my website will work independently from other image-sharing sites. Which is why I decided to start posting stuff here more often, even if I don’t have very special news to share…like an exhibition or a publication or whatever…

My behance profile. Click to check it out