I finished this painting last week. The model is Natalie Dybisz aka Miss Aniela, who I met in August 2009 to do a self-portrait collaboration. I started the painting right after I met with her, but stopped working on it for several months until the first week of February 2010. I’m very excited to share this with you, my first piece made (or finished) in 2010, that will be showcased soon in Singulière Plurielles, my second exhibition in Rennes, France!!

View of the flyer. I’ll be exhibiting with French artist Elsa Alayse at Gallery L’Antre Temps.

I’ll show the rest of my new work soon. In the mean time here’s a preview of my most recent series of drawings, which will also be exhibited at L’Antre Temps:

Pencil on paper. 28 x 24 cm. 2010

Stay tuned for more!

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<.