Gravitas

Opposite: Kent Williams, Upright, mixed media on paper, 24” × 19”. Above, Daniel Sprick, Reclining Nude, oil on panel, 36” × 48”.

Long before Isaac Newton reasoned that a falling apple is acted upon by an unseen force of nature called gravity, the Roman virtue of gravitas denoted weightiness in all its senses, from physical heaviness to seriousness, dignity, and depth of character.

Physically, Earth is a speck in the universe. We are specks on that speck, yet our bodies and the world we live in are almost unfathomably complex—our bodies contain the ability to comprehend gravitas and to generate cells.

In her poem “Evidence,” Mary Oliver writes:

As for the body, it is solid and strong and curious and full of detail: it wants to polish itself; it wants to love another body; it is the only vessel in the world that can hold, in a mix of power and sweetness: words, song, gesture, passion, ideas, ingenuity, devotion, merriment, vanity, and virtue.

Over the centuries, artists have used the human body as an object of beauty and as a means to express the noncorporeal ideas listed in Oliver’s poem.

Daniel Sprick refers to the representations of “a less obvious beauty” in the paintings of Rembrandt and Courbet. “My subjects aren’t all beautiful,” he

acknowledges; “maybe 84% beautiful. . . . There’s something marvelous about everyone.”

When Sprick’s painting Reclining Nude was first exhibited, artists and nonartists clustered in front of it to appraise its surface and its depths, its lights and darks, its soft and hard edges. The model’s hip and left buttock are emphasized by her pose and by Sprick’s use of light on her supple flesh. The light on her torso has a highlight that emphasizes her nipple. Her head is turned away, concealing her individuality and allowing us to look on her as an epitome of womanhood, formed by nature to bring life into the world and to nourish it. Despite her fecundity, the dried, cracked skin of her feet, at lower left, suggests the transitory nature of her vitality. Wade Reynolds’s Figure with Folding Screen presents a female nude in a provocative pose softened by shadow. Reynolds was a master of light and

Below: Wade Reynolds, Figure with Standing Screen, oil on canvas, 48” × 60”. Opposite, top: Kristine Poole, Duende, fired clay, 24.5” × 22” × 21.5”. Bottom left: Shane Wolf, For Thee I Sing, charcoal, chalk, sanguine, and pierre noire on prepared paper, 35.6” × 38”. Bottom right: Soey Milk, White in Shade, graphite on paper, 16” × 14”.

shadow, as Sprick is today. If his minute brush strokes were enlarged to resemble those of the Impressionists or the pointillism of Seurat, you would see myriad juxtaposed colors. They remind us of the complex physical process of seeing and perceiving—of suspending the belief that the surface is merely paint.

His model is exposed to the external effects of light and temperature while delving into the internal processes of her psyche.

In Universal Ties II, a study for his diptych Eros, Shane Wolf has drawn life-size figures of two nude men. The foreshortened foreground figure is supported by the background figure—either in trust or from necessity. “I find it troubling that

Left: Bernardo Torrens, Liz II, acrylic on panel, 32” × 20”. Above: Shane Wolf, Eros: Universal Ties II, charcoal, chalk, sanguine, and pierre noire on prepared paper, 58.4” × 35.6”. Opposite: Harry Holland, Group, oil on canvas, 36” × 40”.

male nudity is censored so aggressively,” Wolf writes, “and why so many of my fellow artists avoid male genitalia all together. Something I find absolutely ridiculous is to see an otherwise lovely drawing or painting of the male figure that has an ambiguous, amorphous, fuzzy, and nondescript ‘haze’ around the pubis. The figure, in its entirety, is something to be admired from all angles.”

The Czech writer Milan Kundera observed, “The male glance has often been described. It is commonly said to rest coldly on a woman, measuring, weighing, evaluating, selecting her—in other words, turning her into an object.” In a male-dominated art world, woman as object became the norm. The “measuring, weighing, evaluating”

Opposite: Lee Price, Surfacing, oil on linen, triptych, 64” × 28” each. Above: Cheryl Kelley, Jewel and the Indigo Children, oil on panel, 48” × 36”.

of the male figure by the male gaze, and the fear of the male figure being perceived as erotic, challenge the male perception of being godlike and heroic.

Whether Mary Oliver’s “solid and strong and curious / and full of detail” or St. Paul’s “temple of the Holy Spirit,” the body contains our being, our means of experiencing and communicating both physically and spiritually.

Nevertheless, Kenneth Clark observed in his book The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form: “No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow—and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.”

—John O’Hern

A CLOSER LOOK