Women/men as appealing subjects

[Mari DeRuntz]

My thoughts on this are not solid. I have to postulate that in relevant work: gender doesn't matter.

Gender is a darling of university art departments: none of which have raised an artist who, through the power of his/her work, has come close to the profound and timeless rendering of human form as the Italian Renaissance draftsmen or painters, or the Greeks.

The female nude is a part of a whole and as such, can only offer one perspective; it cannot embrace the reality of the whole. I recently sat through a 90-minute lecture "The Virgin and the Dynamo" where one feminist academician boxed the work of the murual artists of the American Renaissance (Cox, Blashfield, Vedder) in a feminist cage. Well, she selected examples to prove er theories, ignoring the body of work of all these artists.

Essentially, a great model is a scarcity, and is certainly worth stalking, changing your personal reality for. The anatomy will be determined by the nuances of their skeletons - in ways I cannot yet comprehend. If that model turns out to have a spirit - you are blessed. A spirit, intelligence, work-ethic - well, the best working artists I know all have this level of divine intervention.

A great model gives you Timeless and universal form.

Moments like this I remind myself why I keep a dayjob. Paying the bills should not determine our subjects anymore than the value of oil determines the wars this nation chooses to start.

I know, I am speaking of this reality, but then again, so does the gender-issue belong to this reality, which is far too temporal to matter even 15 minutes from now, let alone next year, or in 100 or 500 years.