Saturday 29 May 2010

Tied on a Stinking Mattress

Not much to say, really. The title says it all. I'm not really into stinky things in real life, but images are another matter.

Today I had a visit from my friend JF. He is a bondage artist in his own right and some time ago, we decided to exchange drawings, each one suggesting a theme to the other. We only did that once, mostly due to laziness on my part, but JF just posted on his blog the drawing I did for him. "Bob and Bill in Jeopardy" is an homage to a French-language adventure hero, Bob Morane, and his "best friend" (ahem! ahem!) Bill Ballantine. Being adventure heroes, they always got into tight spots but never got tied up enough for my and JF's taste.

Monday 24 May 2010

Saran Wrapped

It's been a long time since I posted a new picture. Sorry about that, my life has been rather busy these last few months, both with work (I translate for a living and I had a rather big assignment - translating a book about Osamu Tezuka) and at home. Pierre, my long time companion, has been sick with Alzheimer's disease for years, and a month ago, he had to be hospitalized. He is back home now, in much better health, so I can catch up with a lot of things, including this blog.
I must admit I've been unfaithful to this blog. I've been posting drawings on the gmba google group. It's a group for posting male-oriented fetish art. It's a bit of a mixed bag, with lots of different art styles, with fantasies ranging from the rather tame to the extreme. Not everything's in it is my cup of tea, but I like the variety of approaches and thought it would be a good place to post some art I find too explicit or too un-PC for this blog. Another reason why I didn't post a lot on Jeryn's World is that I haven't worked on material I found tame enough for the blog, I guess.

"Saran Wrapped" is a nice exception. It's got a long and convoluted story. Bear with me.

I first started making bondage and fetish drawings while in my teens, and some of the earliest fetish art I saw were comics by fetish artists from the 1950s Jim and Eneg, who depicted fair damsels in all kinds of nasty predicaments. I used some of that stuff for inspiration, only with mature men as the "victims" back then (this was the 1970s). A few years ago, I discovered the work of fetish and bondage artist Leo Ravenswood, also from the 1970s. He had been publishing drawings, short comics and illustrated stories that used many trappings from the 1950s bondage artists, with long-haired, mustachioed men as the protagonists. I found some info on Leo on the internet, especially on the Mitchmen blog's great A to Z of male fetish artists. I was struck with the fact that Mitchell, the blog owner, had hit upon an aspect of Leo's work I had somehow perceived - that his use of black leather and rubber body encasements gave his men's bodies feminine qualities. That's one way of putting it and it seems to me a perfectly valid point. If you wrap up a man's body in a black, shiny, clinging material, this will certainly make it look more like the fantasy bondage females of the 1950s. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, I find it quite exciting (and fun to draw).
So, when I came across a photo of a very hot New Yorker called Brooklyn Bull saran wrapped, I thought this was so hot that I'd use it as a basis for a drawing. So here it is, in all its black and white glory (homages to fetish drawings of long ago have to be drawn in stark black and white, of course).