yarn never looked this cool

This yarn advertisement is so funky and psychedelic!


Using the female body to market products isn't exactly a new idea. In fact, I'm getting tired of how used up that 'idea' is. I'm also annoyed at the fact that I can't fully enjoy amazing illustrations like this yarn advertisement because it uses the female body to sell yarn. The female body is used to sell just about anything. I post a lot of pictures of scantily dressed women on my blog; it's not that I like women more than men, it's just that of all the pictures of scantily dressed people I find, most of them are women. And that is what I have a problem with. I shouldn't get annoyed. Seriously; negativity never achieves anything. My next post shall have scantily dressed men in it. It will be my little personal gift to cyberspace and humanity.

Real Men Knit

Unconfined Mind has released a documentary called Real Men Knit.
I've only seen the trailer so far, but I like the trailer and the concept. I like that they are all just regular guys, and I hope a lot of men who see this documentary will realise that knitting is something they can try out without feeling that it threatens their masculinity.
Because knitting is not only addictive(trust me, it is..), it's also therapeutic and sort of like meditating, and it's nice to fiddle with something while watching tv/films or on the bus or whenever you have to sit still for a while but have too much energy to do so.



Even though I think it's all very great, I get a little annoyed when they say that knitting was invented by men, so in that way, it's ok for men to knit because they need to reclaim a tradition that originally belonged to them.. - who cares who started it? I see that it's a valid argument, but it's not a necessary one. It would have been ok no matter what. Cool men knit ;)

paintings by camilla d'errico

This lady is half Italian, half Canadian. It doesn't come as a big surprise that she started out doing comics, her paintings are totally manga comic inspired.







Aww how cute is this lamb thing:


Donnie Darko!! :


This Japanese manga comic style seems to be a trend at the moment, and Camilla D'errico is totally doing it right, yet adding her own flavour to the style. Her paintings are amazing and totally cute.

But where are all the boys?? I LOVE love love all the pretty little girls, but I'm sure I would also love the boys if I saw them. There seems to be a major lack of boys in this type of art - and in any type of art in general that isn't for homosexual men.

I feel inspired. I feel the need to do cute stuff. I'm not sure it's a good turn, as my art has become too sugary as it is and need a bit of serious in it. I feel the need to paint more men - only to even things out a little, and I feel like using colours. Sooo when my fingers are starting to hurt too much from my knitting obsession, I will surely start a new painting. I don't think it will be too long, as they hurt a lot as it is.

amanda lepore

upon seeing this photo by i-don't-know-who (do you know who it is by??), i knew i had to find out more about the model. only i couldn't remember the name of the photographer, and i didn't know the name of the model. and yet i found her! as i keep saying; i'm magnetic to things like this.


when i saw more photos of amanda lepore, i realized this wasn't the first time i was fascinated of her; i've also been intrigued by this photo of her by david la chapelle for ages:


the photo by david lachapelle and the one by i-don't-know-who sort of have two different approaches to amanda lepore. the first one is gritty and dark. it speaks of amanda lepore being born armand lepore, it speaks of wanting to be something else- about being transexual, but not in a very cheerful way.

now i like dark stuff, and i like the photo - and i like transexual people and transvestites (hell, if i were a man i'd still wear tutus and glitter make-up) - but i don't know if it's a dignified photo of her? although i guess not everything has to be dignified. it's good to see different sides to things, as there's always more than one truth. and self irony, being able to not take onself too seriously all the time, is important.



i love this photo of pamela anderson and amanda lepore. what a great combination of people, they should walk about together all the time to make people think twice. it makes me think twice.

i sometimes think it's a bit rubbish with all these girls having plastic surgery and breast implants.
yet when someone feels they're born the wrong sex and wants to change it, i'm all supportive.
looking at this photo of pamela and amanda, i feel a bit like a hypocrite. they both want the same thing, so why is it more right for amanda than for pamela? i have to realize that some people just weren't born as perfect as myself, like pamela anderson, so who am i to judge about her need for plastic surgery.. ;)





awwhh this photo sums up my love for amanda lepore; she's such a character - like something out of a comic! she's like a charicature of herself, and i think it's a mighty good charicature.


i watched an interview with amanda lepore on youtube, - she seemed really allert, clever and aware of herself, by the way - and the guy interviewing her asked her why she, as david lachapelle, seemed to embrace the extremes. amanda's answer was that the alternative was just too boring. as i've always said; more is more :)

oh and what do you think of my new layout? does it distract from the content, or does it make the content more easily accessible? good or bad?

stereotype

i love this photo. it's just delightfully bold and wrong. who decides what's wrong and right anyway. i guess when thinking of pregnant women i think of them as all mumsy, dressed in pastels and only thinking of their baby - not on confronting people with their nakedness while wearing high heels and gas masks. i realize there are as many different pregnant women as there are different women in general, yet i do think the stereotype must come from somewhere. certainly not my mother, so maybe the media? fuck the stereotype :)

men, knitting and pride

when doing research on etsy, something i noticed straight away was the lack of things for and by men. men doesn't seem to craft as much as girls, and i wish they would. it's important because i have a boyfriend, two brothers, a dad and countless male friends - and i think they're missing out on a lot of things they could really enjoy and be good at.

i asked my boyfriend why he thinks so few men does crafts like knitting, and he said that it's just no fun. i don't think that's entirely true. men have fun doing a lot of creative things, as long as they can take pride in it and have use of the results.

pride.. what a strange thing pride is. sometimes it encourages people, often it holds people back.

i think a lot of men would feel humiliated by doing a womanly craft like knitting, as if it made them less of a man. some women are humiliated by doing such a womanly craft too, as if it's somehow inferior to manly stuff. but some feminists rightfully claims any women's work should be valued as equally important as digging or any other men's work. they knit to show their pride in the womanly heritage.

some men who DO knit, like knittingmen.com, tries to show people how knitting originally has been men's work(check their history section), and how there has been a great deal of men knitting throughout history. therefore, they have nothing to be ashamed of, because it's a manly thing to do.


well hey, whatever floats your boat. if that is the excuse they need, then so be it.

although wouldn't it be great to se women and men knitting, not because of a feministic embrace of lady-traditions or a manly claim of knitting as a masculine tradition - but because they don't give a shit about tradition!!!? and mainly because it's creative and fun and ohh sooo relaxing. and you don't have to worry about christmas shopping, everyone loves hand made presents.




knitting with balls is a book aimed at men who wants to knit. i think it's a good idea with books on knitting for men, not because they'd feel humiliated having to look in a book for girls, but because books aimed at men will have patterns that will actually fit and look cool on the male body.


check out men who knit, if you want a bit of inspiration. they promote and inspire knitting amongst men.

naked men

this blog entry is a follow up on my last entry about naked ladies. i promised to post pictures of naked men, and i've taken my promise very seriously.

i did a quick google image search on naked men last night and mostly found very gay looking men, photos that made fun of the male body and naked girls. i told my boyfriend that i was trying to find photos of naked men that didn't look too gay and didn't make fun of the body. he said "good luck, i don't think you'll find any".

i think it's important for heterosexual girls to appreciate the male body to get the most out of what life has to offer them. i also think it's important for men to appreciate the male body in order to appreciate themselves.

and i don't understand how it can be so hard to see the beauty in the male body. i personally think it's a very obvious beauty.

here is a couple of pictures i've found on the internet:



as there was girls kissing in my last post i think it's only fair to post these men kissing in the man-post:

and i've also gone to the effort of scanning in a few pages from my "male nudes" book:


i really like this picture, it has a gritty rawness to it:
where is he angular? i think these are great shapes!!:

naked ladies

i find the body infinitely interesting, not only in a sexual way, but as it is. maybe i look at the body differently than a lot of people because i like to do paintings of it, so i don't only see the sexual side of it, i see shapes and colours (and an awful lot of issues on life/death and everything in between).

i found these photos on rex venoms blog. since i started blogging, i've seen an awful lot of men who have entire blogs devoted to pictures of scantily dressed ladies. i've only once come across a blog with scantily dressed men, and that was owned by a gay guy.

i think that's a shame. it's not that i don't find photos of female bodies boring - on the contrary, i think some of the photos of ladies i've seen in men's blogs are well artsy and cool. it's just that there's a definite lack of male bodies!!

when i was in school and was getting into drawing the body, my friend tone asked me why i always drew naked girls, and not men. it was a question that made me think. it wasn't that i didn't want to draw the male body, it was more that i wasn't as sure about how to draw it as i hadn't been exposed to as much photos of naked men as of naked women.



i like the combination of fluff/lack of fluff (ok ok she's just got fluffy legwarmers, i like anything with fluff..):
ooh and i like underwater photos!!:

the body is a cool thing! and with that i pledge to find some pictures of naked men to put in this blog next. only for educational reasons, obviously.

pork flesh vagina sculptures by geza szollosi

this art is mainly about the body. the artist wanted to depict the body as true to the original as possible, and to achieve that, he used pork flesh. clever.
obviously the pork flesh he is using has to be dead prior to sculpting, and as a result, the sculptures seem more like corpses than live bodies. something that also enhance this quality about the work is how the bodies are brutally stitched up and divided into parts. the artist, being a man, has chosen women as his subjects, and it comes as no surprise what sort of "parts" of them he has chosen for the base of his work.




as if showing pork flesh vaginas isn't enough, he then gets intimate with his flesh creations. associations of women seen as meat and objects comes to mind (not to mention necrophilia):




i didn't intend to sound this negative about his work, i actually really LIKE it. i think it's ace how he has created these sculptures, and it really says something dark about the body and mortality.

it's just that in our society, the body is always female, and the eye that sees belongs to a man.
unless it's a male body being seen by a homosexual man. this is nearly the only case where a male body is objectified. if you see porn with cocks and naked men, or even art with naked men, it is nearly always labeled "homosexual".

i have this book on the male body, and when looking at it, it's like i see it through the eyes of a homosexual man. it's not that strange; it's probably been published for homosexual men, and all the photographs are taken by homosexual men.

i want to claim the right for women not to see through the eyes of a man, but through their own, and have what they see aknowledged by all as equally important.

there's nothing wrong with the body being an object, it's an aspect of it's existence. but i don't like the notion of female bodies (and thus myself) as MORE of an object, closer to nature and animal, than the male body.
i refuse to identify with these flesh sculptures as they remind me of this absurd untruth.

i have seen this artist in two of my favourite blogs, unscathed corpse and morbid anatomy, and have been wanting to write about him for quite a while as i found his work absolutely fascinating. i didn't think i'd end up with such a gender issue rant. it's not the artist, but society as a whole that bothers me, and i see the symptoms of it in everything, even in things that i truly like, as geza szollosi's art.

here is a photo from his "betelguese projects". it looks like an elf preserved in formaldehyde! :


check out the artist's website for more of his work.

cute madness by junko mizuno

one of my favourite illustrators, junko mizuno. it guess it won't come as a big surprise that she's japanese. i absolutely love the trend with japan being a trendsetter in fashion and art. i wonder if i'd make better art if i was japanese. if not better, at least i bet i would make cuter and more mad art.

















i think it's great how junko mizuno touches upon the theme of female sexuality, and sort of reclaims it in a cute, cool and positive celebration of girlieness. it's nice to see feminism come in different shapes, as girls are different and relate to different things.

i don't think there is anything wrong in girly stuff, i don't think feminism is about making women more like men. having equal rights and equal respect; hell yes! but i don't see the point in adopting the qualities associated with manlyness (i say ASSOCIATED with as it's a stereotype and not always the case), like this new form of bitch-feminism where women think they're strong and liberated if they sleep around, act insensitive, hard and only think of themselves - and in general just adopt all the most negative things associated with the male stereotype.

i don't think we need more bitches, male or female. it's nicer to be nice and the way forward is fluffyness, respect and love no matter what gender you are.



i want the book of her called hellbabies, it's got a puffy pink cover with glitter and is filled with kick ass illustrations, - and not much to read as far as i can remember. i wouldn't mind the comic cinderella either, i haven't really read any of her comics, i wonder if they're good. i don't think her illustrations need a story though, they're cool enough on their own.