Hide and Seek by Alison Tyler

Author:Alison Tyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cleis Press
Published: 2010-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

I still have the sketches I drew later that day in a frenzied trance of art and lust. They’re good—not my best work by any means, or even my best work from my college days, but they have a raw erotic energy that makes them jump off the page.

It’s a quality I strive for now in my art.

That afternoon marked a change in my work, although I didn’t recognize it right away. I began to see the human body, and the whole natural world, in a different way. I looked at some of the older paintings I’d found boring and recognized the sensuality I’d seen between Jenny and Al blazing in an Ingres nude or smoldering below the surface of one of John Singer Sargent’s respectable portraits of nineteenth-century Boston Brahmin ladies. I asked myself how much of my abstract and “political” artwork I did because it really was my style and how much was a way to play it safe, to keep my work from being too personal and emotionally charged. Too passionate.

And I began, cautiously at first, and then with more abandon, to incorporate more sensuality and passion into my work.

It wasn’t an easy lesson, though. To this day, it’s sometimes easier to hold back, to focus on form and color and line without emotional content, or to retreat to the easy realm of satire. When I realize that my work feels stale and cold, I call on the memory of Al and Jenny and invite their passion to help me.

And sometimes, like today, my subconscious catches me in an artistic cheat and they turn up unbidden—a mental movie reel that takes me back to a spring day in 1983 and brings its joyous sexuality to life in my mind and on my canvas.

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