10 // COASTWEEKEND.COM
IS EROTIC ART
MEANINGFUL OR VULGAR?
Clatsop Community College’s 11th
annual international juried exhibition
‘Au Naturel’ asks viewers to decide
By DWIGHT CASWELL
he international juried
exhibition that is “Au
Naturel: The Nude
in the 21st Century”
returns for its 11th
year, with an opening at 6 p.m.
Thursday, Feb. 9 at Clatsop
Community College’s Royal
Nebeker Gallery. This year’s
juror, Daniel Duford, is the visit-
ing associate professor of art
at Reed College, a 2010 Hallie
Ford Fellow, and recent recip-
ient of an Art Matters grant.
Duford has assembled what
may be the best show yet, and he has also
for the first time edged “Au Naturel” into
a zone that many will label erotic.
Surely the star of this year’s “Au
Naturel” is the quality of draftsmanship,
which avoids the pitfall described by
Henri Matisse: “When an artist or student
draws a nude figure with painstaking
care, the result is drawing, and not emo-
tion.” There is plenty of emotion in this
show.
Thomas Jackson’s “Man” is a work of
strongly felt, simplified realism. The art-
ist’s approach is to apply lines and marks
with strong gestures, “working without
a net,” he calls it. “Viewers of these draw-
ings are reminded,” he continues, “of
body-related social and political issues:
perceptions of ideal beauty and society’s
pressure to attain that ideal; the relentless
use of the youthful human body in mar-
keting; sexuality, gender identification
or ambiguity, body image, relationship
SUBMITTED PHOTO
SUBMITTED PHOTO
“Birch Sketch #4” by Roger Walkup of Baltimore, Maryland.
“Dragon Scales” by Lisette Sanchez of Lake Forest Park, Washington.