The presence of healing

There is very little original work on dA art nude or portrait .. though there is a great deal that is technically excellent .. works ingenious angles on the standard shots. There are images where you get a sense of another human being, strong or fragile, looking directly at you, or allowing you to see something real about them that is more than a pose or a cliche expression. There is cliche nude, glamour, fashion that is so well done that who would not smile; bodies and faces are beautiful things.

But a lot of it seems to be trying for something unique or original .. perhaps to take a genre shot and introduce a sense of something special. Perhaps a sense that the model is really special, which so many are, even if they don't realise it. Perhaps a sense that the moment is unique, and passes quickly, and we should try to preserve it.

I fave a lot of shots that are genre shots, some because the model is exceptionally beautiful, some for the colours or the composition, some because the combination of a woman's sex and her happy, frank gaze at someone who is seeing it is one of the most beautiful things in the world. I knelt there at the delta, at the alpha and omega .. and just for a second I was healed, and my heart was at ease, as Big Len puts it.

These are icons in the best sense, embodiments of something that goes beyond the individual moment or person. They don't have to be beautiful in any conventional sense, but the conventions help us to see what is unique, just as in the orthodox tradition an icon painter consciously avoids originality of colour or composition, and that's why the images express a uniqueness of vision. If, like in the Leonard Cohen song (Light As The Breeze) we are healed, or cured, or at ease or at peace, and if we repeat that moment often, whether by photographing it, or being the embodiment of it as a model, or by looking at the image .. maybe if we repeat that moment very often the healing can gradually go deeper. The idea of ownership of a piece of work, in the sense of intellectual or creative rights, is a modern one that says more about our conception of property than it does of art. The idea of intellectual property is meaningless apart from the claim to originality. That being so, nothing is more pathetic than presenting someone else's work as your own. But originality is an illusion and the search for it a diversion. Let's reclaim unoriginality.