(Note: In case you’re having a sense of déjà vu, I posted a version of this piece on Facebook and Instagram yesterday. I’m sending it out again since many Substackers are not also on those two.)
On a recent visit to the Hirsch Library, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, I finally got a look at this book, Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community (AMMO Books, 2017), which has quickly become a rather scarce and expensive collectors' item in recent years. The book grew out of an exhibition of the same title, presented at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in 2014 in New York City.
Reading the text and viewing the images in the book have helped me in constructing an intellectual framework around an aspect of my needlepoint adventures - particularly the current pieces based Jean Cocteau's erotic drawings of French Sailors, from the early 20th Century - as well as the others in my Naughty Boy Needlepoints series.
Due to their explicit imagery, they probably have to be pixelated or fig-leafed for Facebook and Instagram, as here. So I’ll maintain the veil even here on perhaps less prudish Substack.
Some viewers have suggested (jokingly, I hope) that the pieces are pornographic.
But really, can images presented in needlepoint EVEN BE pornographic? Doesn't transforming them into a medium so utterly domestic, that says so soothingly "reading chair cushion," …
… that in the view of most is so delicately “feminine,” automatically remove them from the taint of GAY PORNOGRAPHY?
Well, I guess it's all in the eye of the beholder, and certainly one point of my doing these is to cause eyes to blink, take a second look, and maybe reconsider what they may think they see on first glance. Just as the artists included in QUEER THREADS have done for me.
Randy, your needlepoints are always amazing to me, the intricacies of your stitching, your eye for subtleties of color, and your patient attention to detail. As for the subject matter, that's your choice, your artistic expression of beauty. I don't know if it's my old Catholic school indoctrination or my feeling that sometimes "less is more," but I'm grateful that the fig leaves allow me to explore your art more freely. And you, and they, make me smile as I head out to garden. You rock!