Renek Gaszewski [Blog]

Renek Gaszewski:

A tiger, a black swan, a pregnant woman and a fiery red “kalesa” [horse-drawn carriage] in front of a rundown building, these were some of the subjects of photography students, who mounted their first exhibit last week in Makati City. Read the rest of this entry »

Renek Gaszewski:

So my modeling career is shaping up nicely. Yup. Some people out there are into hair and they’re calling my name.
When you read this article, I should have already been posing for a couple days. See, I’ve got these friends of mine that consider themselves “artists.” And as “artists” they occasionally need someone to “art.” Read the rest of this entry »

A silly slumber party photo prompted child pornography charges against two Pennsylvania teens who posed in their undies. A mildly risque image landed six Massachusetts middle schoolers in court, facing felony child pornography charges.
And 20 percent of the nation’s teens and tweens may face those charges next.
Teens have been posting scantily clad images of themselves online since the early days of MySpace. Now they’ve been joined by their middle school and even elementary school colleagues. And the proliferation of cell phone cameras in the past several years has given even the younger crowd the opportunity to snap those pictures anytime and anywhere, and send them not just to that special someone, but to, well, everyone.
A single image, sent as a silly joke or sexy come-on, becomes a major liability the moment a young couple breaks up “… or some eager-to-impress young stud or hottie shows the images to the rest of the team “… or someone leaves his cell phone unattended.
The technology, says Anastasia Goodstein, a San Francisco-based youth culture expert, allows private photographs to go viral as quickly as the latest hot YouTube video.
“It’s public, even if you think it’s private,” says the author of “Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online.” “Once it’s out there it can spread very quickly, damage reputations and cause all kinds of problems, including legal issues — which is a whole new topic of ridiculousness.”
At least a fifth of the nation’s teens — and a third of young adults, ages 20-26 — have “sexted” or text-messaged racy images of themselves or others, via cell phone or online, according to a 2008 survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teenage and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com.
Psychologist Susan Lipkins, a national authority on teens and young adults, puts the numbers even higher — and younger. About 6 percent of the kids who “sext,” she says, started at age 9. By middle school, it’s rampant. Up to two-thirds of teens do it. And the reasons they do it will surprise most parents.
Sexting has taken the place of fluttered eyelashes and coy looks. About 66 percent of the girls who sent sexts did it to be flirtatious, according to the CosmoGirl study, and 52 percent as a sexy present for a guy, but some 40 percent of the girls said they sent them as a joke.
But, says Lipkins, what’s really happening is nothing less than a cultural, sexual revolution, with parents on one side of the divide and their technological teens on the other.
“They’ve been online their whole lives,” she says. “They look at everything differently — sex, relationships, privacy and personal ownership. It’s a total break from previous generations and sexting is a symptom and a symbol of that new way of thinking.”
Sexting, says Lipkins, is “a new mating call” in a casual hookup culture, and one that needs a better response. The legal issues are a major problem — why punish the victims of viral sexts, she asks, and why aren’t prosecutors using existing sexual harassment laws instead?
But even without the legal ramifications, the humiliation factor can be devastating. Jesse Logan, an Ohio 18-year-old, committed suicide last year after her ex-boyfriend forwarded her nude pictures to the entire school, and classmates responded with relentless harassment.
The teen discussion forums on the CosmoGirl Web site are rife with warnings from high schoolers who have seen reputations destroyed and friends humiliated.
One girl recounted the story of a friend who sent a seminude image to her boyfriend.
“Within hours, the entire student body plus a teacher got it,” Chicky0903 writes in her post. “This went around so fast that I got it four times in two hours. She got suspended from school — she wasn’t 18 so its ‘child porn.’”‰” The girl was kicked off the student council, Chicky0903 continues, and utterly humiliated.
“Respect your body,” she concludes. “Think twice.”
These are not isolated cases, says Miramonte High junior Carina Chiodo, and the fallout can be considerable.
“At my school, sexting will mainly just get you a really embarrassing reputation, but there are still plenty of girls who do it,” the Orinda teen says. “I’ve seen photos of a senior guy at my school posing naked that he sent to several girls. A girl at my school sent pictures to some guy, and they got forwarded to just about everyone on campus. (It’s) kind of the thing to do if you’re attention-hungry. I think it’s disgusting and anyone that does it might as well take the naked photos that they’re sending other people and post them on a freeway billboard, because it’s only a matter of time before every person at the school will see it.”
Pinole graduate Joseph Natividad was startled by the very question — enough so that he asked friends at UC San Diego their opinions as well. Their consensus: Eww. It’s certainly not something everyone does, he says, and in many circles it’s regarded as distinctly déclasse.
Goodstein agrees.
“Yes, some teens are doing this — some very famous teens — but not all teens,” she says. “It’s something parents should be aware of, another topic to talk about. Teens have always been sexually curious. They have a lot of hormones raging and they’re using the technology they use for everything else to express that very normal part of being a teen. But the other normal part of being a teen is not thinking through the consequences of what you do.”
Once upon a time, a kid could make mistakes, says Walnut Creek psychologist Richard Freed, who specializes in kids and media issues.
“With digital information, the mistakes are forever,” he says. “I don’t think you can give your kid a cell phone and not talk about the responsibilities that come along with that.”
Bottom line?
“Think,” says Goodstein, “before you text — or sext.”

The common links in two very different summer shows at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art are thematic idealism and technical bravura. • Probably more important to visitors are their differences. “Picturing Eden” is the larger show, 155 contemporary photographs by 37 artists from around the world, famous and emerging, that loosely or literally link idealism and disillusion, the mythical concept of paradise and gritty environmental concerns. “Language of the Nude: Four Centuries of Drawing the Human Body” is a collection of 56 drawings from the Italian Renaissance to the early 19th century that explores the changing ways artists have portrayed the body, balancing the real and ideal according to their times and tastes. One provokes, the other soothes. Both use beauty as an aesthetic benchmark.
“Beauty” may seem an unlikely word for many of the works in “Picturing Eden,” which was organized by the venerable George Eastman House. Images are bizarre or unsettling, rendered more so by vivid colors and large formats. Simen Johan’s little boy, for example, digs in a dirt mound that looks to be a grave crawling with maggots as wisps of human hair emerge under his hands. Ruud van Empel poses a young black girl wearing a white dress in a verdant jungle with suggestions both of Village of the Damned and the Edenic fall and loss of innocence. (Note that phallic pink flower near her left shoulder.) Yet beautiful they are technically.
The range of photographic processes is broad. A lot of the artists turn to old methods such as daguerreotypes and photograms, which create only single prints, not multiples. Photograms forgo the camera, laying an object on light-sensitive paper and then exposing it to a light source.
Adam Fuss translates Genesis in a photogram triptych of slithering snake, dead rabbits surrounded by dried flowers, and a baby floating in golden liquid. Vietnamese artist Binh Dahn harnesses the chlorophyll in leaves, laying negatives of battle scenes on them and letting the dim images of war emerge as the foliage dries in the sun. Sally Mann’s 1998 gelatin silver print was made using the 19th century collodion process. Its yellowed tones give the landscape an elegiac effect appropriate to the location: the site of 14-year-old Emmett Till’s racially motivated murder in 1955. Ghostly faces peer from Mark Kessell’s The Residue of Vision, a daguerreotype that he photographed, then enlarged, in which the features are reduced to black holes.
New technology is abundant, too. Mike and Doug Starn dominate one gallery with their complex video in which we’re taken Fantastic Voyage-style through a warren of leaves that disintegrate down to their veins with digital stripping. And there are plenty of high-quality ink-jet prints such as Maggie Taylor’s intriguing (as always) collages that veer between 19th century macabre and 21st century irony.
• • •
The beauty of “Language of the Nude,” the Ringling’s second special exhibition, will be more readily quantified by traditionalists. It’s art in one of the purist forms, drawing. Though it was for centuries considered only a step toward creating “real” art, everyone believed drawing prowess to be the test of any good artist. Artists studied drawing for years, informally at first as apprentices, then in more formal academies established throughout Europe. And the concentration was on the human body, which historically always figured in the most regarded subjects for art.
In this show, we see lots of lovely flesh and how standards of representing it as something beautiful and idealized changed through the centuries.
Peter Paul Rubens’ well-muscled male with attention to correct anatomy reflects the Renaissance reverence for Michelangelo’s glorious viscera. Rococo master Francois Boucher was less interested in actually fleshing out details of his women in The Birth of Venus, more concerned with establishing its composition for a specific painting, so the chalk drawing looks as if it were done as a rapid dash.
Compare Jacques-Louis David’s (1748-1825) neoclassical drawing, Funeral of a Hero, a meticulously rendered study of a funeral procession from antiquity, with Flying Female Nude by Ignace-Henri Fantin-Latour (1836-1904), a fantasy done with blithe, exuberant strokes of crayon, each reflecting the era and artistic style of its creator.
One of the loveliest and most curious drawings is Albrecht Durer’s 1498 pen and ink Female Nude With a Staff. Durer, perhaps the greatest printmaker of all time and one of the greats of the northern Renaissance (he was German), drew as he etched, using lots of crosshatching. Like Michelangelo, his near-contemporary to the south, he was consumed with getting the human body right, and he tries mightily here to do so. But the woman’s shoulder is a mess, crudely done and looking deformed. We see more evidence of his unsureness in lines along other contours that were clearly mistakes he corrected. It’s an example of greatness evolving and the practice, practice, practice needed to go from proficient to extraordinary.
This is a wonderful exhibition and asks you to look closely at the works. Notice the details, things like hands and feet — were they done with care, indicating a desire to use the drawing as a learning moment, or with haste, in service to the larger goal of figuring out overall placement and proportion? Look, too, at the materials — pen and ink, chalk, washes — and their varying qualities and effects.
Mostly notice how central drawing was to becoming and remaining an artist. And still is. The collection was assembled by the Crockers, wealthy Californians, mostly between 1869 and 1871; Mrs. Crocker donated it to the state in 1885 as part of what is known as the Crocker Art Museum. For many years, the collection was used by students of its art school as models for their own drawings. But drawings are fragile, and now these are mostly stored in a dark vault.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a superb draftsman not represented in this show, said, “Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, modeling. See what remains after that.”
For visitors who want to try their own hand, the museum has set up a drawing studio in the back gallery with easels, materials and statues to copy as the artists in this show often did. Or, if you have a volunteer, to draw from life, the only stipulation being that the live model depart from tradition and remain clothed.

Nude models are coming to MOSI.
No, Tampa’s Museum of Science and Industry isn’t turning into a gentleman’s club. But Tuesday, the kid-friendly venue’s Body Worlds and the Story of the Heart exhibit will host nude models. They’ll replicate the poses of the exhibit’s preserved, skinless human figures. MOSI invites artists to draw, paint or sculpt the subject, but gawkers need not inquire.
“It’s not anything that’s vulgar; it’s just something that’s artistic,” said Sarah Lajevardi, marketing manager for Body Worlds. “Even though this is a children’s museum, we still talk about the body,” she said, citing MOSI’s Amazing You exhibit. Sketch Night will begin at 7 p.m., two hours after the museum closes.
This is the MOSI’s second Sketch Night; the first was May 19. At that event, one male and one female model held each pose for about 40 minutes, replicating the archer, the torch bearer, the kneeling lady, the gymnast on the beam and more.
“It was quite challenging,” Lajevardi said. “They’ll kind of have to shake it out here and there and maybe take a five-minute break.”
Sixty artists attended the first Sketch Night. Their feedback? The event was a rare opportunity to observe the human form outside of an art studio. They just wish it had lasted longer. So this time organizers will extend Sketch Night from two hours to three, with a minimum of four models — at least one of each gender.
Douglas Land, who teaches drawing workshops throughout Tampa Bay, had time for seven or eight studies during the first Sketch Night.
“From an educational standpoint, it’s really a good opportunity because normally we would just have illustrations in a book or maybe a plastic model that you can refer to for the muscles bones, anatomy and that,” said Land, 55, of St. Petersburg. He keeps the sketches in his home studio and may use them for reference in one of his classes. Land considers the first Sketch Night a success, and he plans to return Tuesday. “It was well attended, and it was very professional — good lighting, and I think the extra hour will be nice.”
Was he weirded out by seeing models disrobe at a children’s museum?
“Not really,” Land said. “I think that that’s part of what they do. They have educational exhibits. Some may not be as good for young children.”
Similar events have been held at other museums that hosted Body Worlds. The exhibit closes at MOSI June 28 and then heads to Buffalo.