NUDE RIVER
November-December 2025
65 DIGITAL SKETCHES ON THE THEM OF NUDE BATHING IN RIVERS
I had in mind an imaginary place, frequented by nude bathers, not directly related to personal experience. It might also be a real place, unvisited. Both work. It would be like Moon River, but with more than mooning.
Either way, it was to have been constructed from images commonly available on the web. And therein lay my first problem: a reality check on the needs and uses of such imagery. I’d forgotten or ignored how tawdry the market in masturbation and exhibitionism was. The kind of nude I sought was naïve or quaint, belonged to the ‘naturalism’ of nature lovers - naturalists. The practice of nude beaches and sun bathing.
I exchanged beaches for more inland scenes, for forests and rivers. But this too had been hopelessly corrupted by the squalid scenes of those taking matters into their hands, just a little too readily.
So the series became a reclamation of places overgrown with temptation, a retreat from places flourishing in puritanism. Quite which is which I remain uncertain.
More notes bottom of the page.
NB click on image for enlargement
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That the theme should even need justification says much about the fragmentary and uncertain nature of our culture. Perhaps it were always so.
The nude is, of course, a classical category or genre and the ideals attributed there are lost or discarded in a world overpopulated with nations and tribes. We can’t turn the calendar back. At best we trace the flow of inspiration to its limits, the tributaries of the fortunate and fervid.
A Nude River is my contribution. Every generation invents its own tradition.
