TOM of FINLAND: Original Drawings

Concludes with A Recognition from St. Louis LGBT History Project

Closing Reception and Mixer is Sunday, August 7, 2011, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m.

PHD Gallery
2300 Cherokee Street
St. Louis, MO 63118

TOM OF FINLAND (Finnish, 1920 – 1991), Untitled (Preliminary drawing)
1988, Graphite on paper, 11.50” x 8.50”, ToFF #0399
© 1988 Tom of Finland Foundation

Founded in 2007, The St. Louis LGBT History Project  is operated by Steven Brawley (founder), Colin Murphy and Ian Darnell.

The mission of The Project is to preserve the myriad stories of The Gateway City’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender past. As a resident partner of The LGBT Center of St. Louis, The Project serves as the unofficial collecting arm for the St. Louis LGBT Archives  at UMSL, conducts and facilitates oral histories with area LGBT Elders, works with area LGBT organizations on maintaining their own archive, and seeks out and preserves LGBT history, documents, artifacts and memorabilia. The Project has developed a LGBT Walking Tour in the city’s Central West End, is available to speak on St. Louis’ LGBT History and provides displays from The Project collection. The goal of The Project is to not only celebrate and preserve our city’s LGBT History, but make it accessible through digital media. For more information .

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Gallery representation for the work of
Tom of Finland
is
Feature Inc.
131 Allen Street, New York, New York

Through special arrangement with Feature Inc.
there is currently an exhibition in Saint Louis
(through August 6^th)
Tom of Finland: Original Drawings
PHD Gallery
2300 Cherokee Street, Saint Louis, Missouri

Photo by Phillip Stuart, 1985.

In Europe,
Galeria Espacio Minimo
Doctor Fourquet 17, Madrid, Spain

With an exhibition in the Netherlands
(through September 4^th)
Tom of Finland and Mates
Galerie MooiMan
Noorderstationsstraat 40, Groningen, The Netherlands

Walk with Tom of Finland

See the places where Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, lived and loved from war years until his death in 1991. The walk begins at Svenska Teatern (the Swedish Theater) and takes us round southern Helsinki through the Esplanade to South Quay, and on to Observatory Hill and Kaivopuisto Park. During the tour we will hear excerpts from an historic interview in which Tom himself talks about his experiences on the gay scene in Helsinki.  The walk takes about 2 hours and ends at Hugo’s Room for the inaugural get-together of Finlandization 25.

We’ll meet up at Erottaja Bus Terminal by the Swedish Theatre at 7 pm

Get together party

After the tour you can start partying at Hugo’s Room. Get together party  starts at 9 PM and continues to 2AM.

Helsinki, 19–21.

Opastettu kävelyretki Tom of Finlandin jalanjäljissä eteläisessä Helsingissä. Käymme paikoissa joissa myös Tom kävi ja koki pimeän ja syntisen Helsingin hekuman sota-ajoista meidän päiviimme saakka. Kierroksella voi kuulla historiallisen haastattelun otteita, joissa Tom itse kertoo kokemuksistaan käheänlämpimällä äänellään. Lähtö kello 19 Erottajan bussipysäkiltä Ruotsalaisen teatterin vierestä. Kierros kestää noin kaksi tuntia ja päättyy Finlandization 25:n tervetulokokoontumiseen Hugo’s?Roomiin.

‘History should be honest,’ Gov. Jerry Brown says in signing the state law, which had sparked hot debate among legislators.

July 15, 2011|By Patrick McGreevy, Los Angeles Times

Tom of Finland A self-taught Finnish native who sought creative refuge in 1960s Los Angeles, where he was able, miraculously, to make a living drafting pencil-rendered cartoons of eroticized gay machismo, Tom of Finland straddled taboo and popular appeal long before the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga.

TOM OF FINLAND

A former anti-aircraft officer and commercial illustrator, Tom (a.k.a. Touko Laaksonen) harnessed essential qualities from both fields, making uniformed dress as suggestive as negligee and a clear, graphic line evocative of Norman Rockwell, Marvel comics, Vargas Girls and Warholian Pop Art. In this exhibit of his relentlessly simple and strangely delicate drawings, finished works are interspersed between incomplete sketches. Square-jawed males with barrel chests, broad shoulders, petite waists and other proportional impossibilities appear in solitary, glorified repose or explicit couplings. Yes, the work was made to titillate — but hell, so was most Greek and Roman art. And like his classical forebears, Tom graces every male figure (and Tom’s is a male-only universe) with a placid, enlightened-looking smile. The finished works exhibited here are much more demure than the sketches, the more overt sexual acts receding beneath dim erasures and incomplete limbs while suggestive gazes, sawed-off logs and rakishly angled sailor caps resonate in full black-and-white detail. This is where the work rises above genre: it’s sheer bizarreness. In a motorcyclist’s tilted hat, a single rolled-down leather boot or an outfit consisting of white gym socks and high-top sneakers, a microcosm of style and desire is written. How Tom’s beefcake homoeroticism became a standard-issue brand is another story — but such is the course of any enduring style. Through August 6 at phd Gallery, 2300 Cherokee Street; 314-664-6644 or www.phdstl.com. Hours: noon-4 p.m. Thu.-Sun. and by appointment.

Jessica Baran encapsulates the St. Louis art scene

Without a doubt Michael Kirwan’s illustrations are sexually charged, quite often even pretty horny—but they are also a witty distillate of gay lust and realities. It’s seeing, understanding and painting: Kirwan doesn’t care for soft-focus and smooth idolization of beauty; comparable to Otto Dix he rather gets inspired by mere lust than high-gloss desires. His idea of sex is not about after shave and eau de toilette, it’s about sweat and hot breath.

This unashamedly depiction on greedy maleness isn’t something ordinary for sure, and the reader will be rewarded richly.

Just So Horny. Comics, Pages: 128, Size: 21,5 x 28,5 cm / 8.5 x 11.25 inch, Format: Hardcover with dust jaket, Colour: full colour, Language: English,   ISBN 978-3-86787-174-7,  August 2011, $ 34.99

Michael Kirwan was inducted into
Tom of Finland Foundation’s Artist Hall of Fame in 2004.

Mein Schwules Auge Volume 7

Offering a diverse selection of gay erotic literature, art, and photography, this evocation contains contributions from both American and European writers, artists, and photographers. The featured essays, short stories, poems, and artwork focus on the provocative subject of obsessions, demonstrating the changes in every medium of erotic art from one year to the next. Showing how the genre is constantly and creatively reinventing itself, this is a fascinating look at a versatile form of expression.

Media: Paperback Book, 320 pages
Publisher: Konkursbuchverlag
ISBN-10: 3887693973
ISBN-13: 9783887693978

Thanks to Rinaldo Hopf

ON QUEER ART

“Looking around my living room – trying to think if there’s anything here you’d define as Queer art? I don’t have a lot of male nudes hanging around. To my mind, Queer art is homoerotic art. I have a Tom of Finland in Baltimore; I guess you’d call that Queer art. I have an Andy Warhol Asshole.

-John Waters

Artillery, Vol. 5 Issue 5

Benoît Prévot (French)

Prévot is a French illustrator and comic artist that creates stylish homo-erotica. He studied in the EMSAT (Municipal School of Art and Technics). The artist says, “My favorite medium is ink and graphite on paper, because I work a lot in black and white and I like the firm contact of the pencil on the paper. I’m trying to make oil now. It is a new pleasure, but this is not so easy to work on as a soft surface with a pencil that is soft too. When I want to do a new drawing with something fun in it, in connection with eroticism, I start to find an idea, a situation. I think then I make sketches and after that I start the piece. I used to draw the peoples most of the time with my imagination. I have models who pose for me sometimes and this is how I really like to work.”

Angelface Blog