Goddess Gallery

“Yes, art is dangerous, and if it is chaste, it isn’t art.”
– Picasso

There is a corner at Raven Frame Works which is devoted to the female form. I call it the Goddess Gallery. There are photos, etchings, paintings and sculpture, all exploring the female form through artistic exploration. While this may not be politically correct at this time, I feel that it is important to keep this avenue of communication and exploration open. This page is dedicated to the historic perspective and current relevance to this particular art form.

“To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.” – Sir Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

“To be naked is to be without disguise… Nudity is a form of dress.”
– John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling… The desire to grasp and be united with another human is so fundamental a part of our nature that our judgement of what is known as ‘pure form’ is inevitably influenced by it, and one of the difficulties of the nude as a subject for art is that these instincts cannot be hidden.”
– Sir Kenneth Clark

“Being moved by art means having real reactions to unreal events; art would be of little importance otherwise.”
– Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure