Tom Quinn:
The Art Of Nudity
This article, written by the artist, originally appeared the AANR Bulletin in 2018.
Becoming a professional artist isn’t like becoming a doctor or a lawyer. You don’t need academic credentials to qualify for a license to practice. But it doesn’t hurt. I took art classes all through high school and was an art major at Gonzaga University and the Art Institute of Seattle.
A good art education is not for anyone averse to nudity. You watch hundreds of slides of nudes, starting with the stone “Venuses” carved by Paleolithic artists and ending with David Hockney’s bathers. You spend hundreds of hours drawing and painting from nude models, and you might even pick up some extra dollars as a model yourself, like I did. You must amass an impressive portfolio, and it doesn’t hurt if that contains some well-done nudes.
But then you graduate, and you find galleries are surprisingly reluctant to show nudes and collectors aren’t eager to buy them. I should emphasize the the kind of nudes I like to paint are not the conventional kind — a beautiful woman reclining on a settee or bathing in a creek. I have nothing against pictures like that, but I don’t want to paint them myself. I want to do pictures that are surprising and refreshing, that turn the viewer’s expectation on its head.