Right at the end of this just-over 2 day paintathon, I decide to leap ahead a couple hundred years and try my hand at a Gainsborough – his portrait of  Mrs. Grace Dalrymple. Well, the result has a bit too much of a paint-by-numbers feeling for my taste. Maybe next Christmas I will give the 18th century another try… Meanwhile, a very merry Christmas to all!

Cockadoodle: The Erogenous Art of Maurice Vellekoop
Curated by Bren O’Callaghan

Cockadoodle: The Erogenous Art of Maurice Vellekoop is a flamboyant new exhibition that uncorks the Canadian artist’s contribution to illustration, underground comics and contemporary erotica. It will be Maurice Vellekoop’s first European solo exhibition with a wide selection of his erotic output on show alongside examples of his mainstream editorial work.

Vellekoop draws from a vast and familiar pool of televisual and filmic motifs to reflect wider truths, suppressed fantasies and classic archetypes, fashioning a unique visual signature that is at once widely marketable (commercial clients include The New Yorker, Vogue, Wallpaper, New York Times and Rolling Stone), yet unabashedly erotic.

Ripe for celebration, Vellekoop is a leading figure within an under-the-counter pantheon of artist-illustrators who trace their lineage to the golden age of powder-tinted girlie artists, from Alberto Vargas to Zoë Mozert and Gil Elvgren, to the leather-clad muscles of later male fantasy art, encompassing Tom of Finland, Harry Bush and Frank Frazetta.

The exhibition has been created at a moment of renewed significance as Vellekoop embarks upon a graphic memoir, I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together! commissioned by the Canadian Council for the Arts and edited by author and award-winning art director Chip Kidd, to be published by Pantheon Books.

EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS

Maurice Vellekoop’s Pin-Ups is his most successful book of explicit male ‘beefcake’ illustrations, the gay male equivalent of cheesecake beauties, inspired by vintage girlie art and featuring calendar boys, musical idols, sporting legends and figures from fantasy, history and literature.

ABC Book, An Adult Primer takes the form of a traditional children’s primer, complete with rhyming couplets, and re-imagines it for adults from a guileless, x-rated perspective.

Premiere of Transworld, a 16 page strip that features a North Korean, transgender air stewardess and a zipper-bursting encounter with a hunky Iranian male passenger, in an alternative spin on the temptations posed by the so-called axis of evil.

The World of Gloria Badcock follows the sexploits of glamorous, bisexual magazine editrix Gloria Badcock and her gay companion Dr. Cornelius as they travel back in time to the eve of the French Revolution, cavorting with courtesans and servants alike at the court of Marie Antoinettte.

From colourful characters such as Dame Formalda Hyde and Vatda Heck and references ranging throughout the history of opera to the heights of Wagnerian solemnity and the excesses of French spectacle, A Nut at the Opera is a droll satire of a fictitious operatic cornucopia.

Editorial commissions ranging from the Hieronymus Bosch inspired The World of Lustly Delights, cover art for No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics and English Eccentrics for Abercrombie and Fitch, featuring a Mad Hatter’s tea party attended by the likes of Quentin Crisp, Dusty Springfield and Alan Turing.

EVENT PROGRAMME

The exhibition is supported by a programme of events and activities that address notions of private shame, empowerment, sex-positivism and the often overlooked role of personal fantasy in critical cultural appreciation.

These will include the Manchester premiere of London nude literary salon Naked Boys Reading with the theme “True North”, a presentation by the artist on his practice with Got Lead: Drawing Sex, Arousal and Desire, and the Erotic Film Society presents an evening with Amory Peart, specializing in transgressive adult parodies of mainstream features, including The Bionic MILF and a biopic of Aggie Snatcher in The Iron Lady Garden for Television X.

Tickets for the above on sale shortly – links will appear on this page.

Cockadoodle: The Erogenous Art of Maurice Vellekoop, curated by Bren O’Callaghan, is supported by Arts Council England, Manchester Pride and Homotopia Liverpool.

Twenty Twenty Two, Manchester 15 August to 13 September 2014. Liverpool venue and dates to be announced.

I was so thrilled to be asked to create this illustration for a review of Armistead Maupin’s final volume of his “Tales of the City” series, titled “The Days of Anna Madrigal”, for the New York Times Book Review, which appeared today. Thanks, Nicholas Blechman, for thinking of me!

Last weekend I made another batch of gouache on coloured paper Christmas cards for friends and family. My first idea was to do paintings of elaborate cakes and food . I just couldn’t get them to work out, so I took a left turn and ended up with… Renaissance and Elizabethan jewelry! Of course, what else?

Merry Christmas, yall!

Here is a commission from The Boston Globe for an article titled, “Thanksgiving, or how to eat American politics,” by Rachel Laudan, author of “Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History”. Her piece traces the evolution of the ‘traditional’ turkey dinner as a kind of populist reaction against stuffy, aristocratic, European modes of dining. Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book (pictured bottom left) democratically proposed inviting children to join adults in a simple, nutritious meal that was a reaction against the fancy sauces and elaborate molded desserts beloved of monarchs across the Atlantic. It was she who persuaded Abraham Lincoln to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday 150 years ago.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my friends in the US!