Shifting Ideals

1-4-2015
I've been drawing pictures for as long as I can remember, but the fact that I have been going on doing it, and not have given it up after childhood, like so many,has a lot to do with one subject: bondage. It found it's way into my early doodles when I was about twelve years old, I think, and it started because, although I was inspired by some scattered images I had found, and some scenes on television, I couldn't find what I was really looking for, so I started picturing it myself.
What I wanted to see, was the dominated party, dominated (I've wrote about this before, and I won't go into details here). A consequense of that was that from early on, I liked to draw physically strong girls and women, tied up and helpless, and not liking it. In those days (as today, for that matter) I was quite inspired by women in for instance athletics, or gymnasts or swimmers, to name a few sources.

 But then, at the beginning of the eighties, I think, female bodybuilding started to kick in with the likes of Rachel McLish, Kike Elomaa, Carla Dunlap and Lynn McConkwright (who later turned out to be of great interest for our mutual fascination, but that's another story).
Well, it would be fair to say that I found my favorite juxtaposition between great power and the indignity of helplessness right there and then, based on these muscular physiques. I guess that was obvious in my first published works and on wards, because the complaints about my models being to muscular have been there from day one. But there was some appreciation, too.

So, years later, I tried to make everything a bit more satisfactory by making a seperate corner for the true bodybuilders in peril, for a niche public, and tone the rest down a bit (I know, I know: most of the time I fail miserably, but at least you'll have to admit there IS a difference ).
What was very satisfying for ME on the other hand, was that slowly but surely, I saw the models in other artists work change. In main stream work, and in the BDSM field, the women started to look more and more athletic. Sure, more like fitness queens than full fledged body builders, but still.

And now, in, say, this last decade, things are really starting to happen.

It seems that on the exaggeration level, I am being overtaken left and right, by a bunch of artists.

And I mention this not as a complaint; I like what I see. I truly hope that this will continue, that more and more artists, in BDSM and main stream art will start to recognize the beauty and consequent excitement generated by the spectacle of an incapacitated muscular physique. Who knows: maybe I was just ahead of my time!

COCO

New in the shop: Tabula Rasa number three! The last part of the triptych about the memory manipulators!

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