How do you map inspiration? How do you map the things that make you feel awake and a little more alive, more devoted to artistic practice and capturing an era as best you can, things that make your mind go brr? I’m going to try here to trace a line and explain how one thing has led to another. I’m missing some things to be sure, because 1) basically everything here stems from an existing interest of mine 2) inspiration doesn’t map that easy. But I think it’ll be an interesting exercise, and a blog is nothing if not an exercise in self-indulgence and building an archive, so.
I don’t remember how I actually came across Winton Kidd. Per my browser history, it was via his erotic Edwardian comic Fitting for a Lady, which I got to by looking at Yamino’s itch.io page where there is a collection of “queer works by other talented people” that includes Fitting for a Lady. I love lesbians and historical fashion, so it’s not a surprise I immediately jumped down the rabbit hole of Kidd’s work. Anyway, that was back in October, and I subscribed to his Patreon the same day, but for whatever reason earlier this month I became really fixed on what he was posting there — I was feeling really inspired by his pinups and the lovingly erotic eye he turns on the women he draws.
So then I went to the Strand one Saturday to sell books and also with an eye toward getting a book of pinup art so that I could do some studies of my own. Instead, I walked out with…
Early Erotic Photography, Serge Nazarieff
It’s a little weird to talk about erotic works in public, isn’t it? As an avid romance reader I’ve become used to being unapologetic about my interest in the genre, but when it comes to visual representation I start to feel more awkward. I guess because with romance novels you’ll often go “it’s not ABOUT the sex” or pretend no one has a sexual interest in them. Note that this is not me saying that romance novels are erotica, or exist to be sexually stimulating; they’re not. A book can be sexually stimulating without that being its primary object; a reader can read one of these books without the intent of sexual stimulation, but rather the intent of a good, melodramatic tale. Yes, the sex is an important element of modern romance, but they’re serving a different literary goal than erotic literature does. (I could go on about this, and I won’t, but eventually there will probably be a blog post all about the academic nonfiction on romance novels I’ve been reading as research for a TTRPG.) Anyway — with erotic art and literature, the sex is front and center, and it’s harder to ignore in visual representation than in literary. Sex is still kind of taboo in our culture, blah blah, none of this is really the point! I love photography, I love early photography, and I love photography of women past. Daguerrotypes also just look incredibly cool. This book prints photographs from the 1840s by French photographers who, quelle surprise, really led the development of erotic photography. The photos are beautiful both for the obvious qualities (the photographers spent a lot of time on set design, and again, daguerrotypes just look cool!) and for subtler ones: the way they capture people who lived nearly 200 years ago, the body hair visible on the models’ pubic areas and underarms, the fact that they feel like celebrations.
“Starburned and Unkissed,” Caroline Polachek
Talk about feeling like a celebration. This song is anxious and jealous, but it’s also soaring, love in a grunge-inspired bottle. Caroline Polachek is one of my favorite musical artists and this song rips and I can’t wait to see I Saw The TV Glow. The day I found out this had come out I put the song on repeat and spent hours working on a study from Early Erotic Photography, trying to capture the color and longing of the song.
Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Sharon Marcus
I bought this a while ago because I wanted to know how much truth there was to the line that “women were just more physical with their friends in the past in a way we don’t recognize now, it’s called romantic friendship” and I read the introduction, got a very roughly-sketched answer (“yes and no”) and put it down. (To be fair, I was also in the throes of researching Thinly Veiled, my game on ghosts and Spiritualism, so I only had so much time for things that weren’t…ghosts.) I picked it back up last week and I feel safe saying that this is the right time for me to read this book, being further into the Victorian history mines than I was back then, and also just in a better headspace for it — I think because of all the reading on the romance novel I’ve been doing, it just feels like they go together. In just the first half of the first chapter alone, I’ve learned so much about Victorian women, their friendships and their lives, and the way that sexually and romantically intimate relationships between women slotted into the fabric of Victorian life. Also, I’ve learned that diaries used to be basically for public consumption, which itself is giving me some TTRPG ideas (writing-wise, and games-I’m-currently-playing-wise).
I just really love learning about the women of history, particularly the more ‘ordinary’ women who produced a lot of the lifewriting Sharon Marcus looks at. This book really feels like it celebrates them both as people who once lived and as research subjects. It’s really nice, particularly having recently read a lot about the way people tend to denigrate the masses of women who read romance novels, particularly toward the end of the 20th century.
I took Between Women with me on the train to the Met last weekend, where we saw Sleeping Beauties but where I also was surprised by “The Art of the Literary Poster,” which ended up being more inspirational to me artwise (I’d brought my sketchbook hoping to do some studies, but alas by the time I had time to do so I was tired and grumpy from how packed the Sleeping Beauties exhibition was). I really love the golden age of poster art — which ranges from the 1890s to around the end of WWI. Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec are two of my favorite artists. I’m just a big fan of commercial illustration in general, so it really felt like such a treat to get to spend time with this collection — even more so seeing there were a couple of Leyendeckers in it! I love the bold ink lines and simple colors of lithograph posters, and how the artists arrange their compositions. I took some close-up detail shots because I just marveled so much at the ink lines and the almost raspy quality some of them have. (I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m sure there’s a more precise term that isn’t “raspy”.) The economy of lines, the way they render folds in clothing which is one of my own biggest weaknesses, the way they integrate text and art, it’s just all really wonderful.
On Sunday I spent too much time playing video games. After too many hours of this, I felt overwhelmed by various environmental things like “humidity” (ugh) and “ambient noise” and “my eyes hurting real bad” and so I sat down at the kitchen table for a while to flip through this book and do some studies in my sketchbook. I forgot that I owned this until relatively recently; I must have bought it several years ago, enticed by the Jazz Age bit, and then it wound up in the basement storage unit with a lot of my other photography books. Now it’s back upstairs where it belongs, ready to serve as artistic inspiration, and I was genuinely really pleased with how my sketches came out. I’m feeling very inspired by these earlier eras of photography, and excited to incorporate it into my art. Older photographs work quite well as study reference, I think, because they’re monochromatic, often fairly high-contrast (so it’s easier to pay attention to key lines and details), and very posed. You can do a lot of interpretation (because the contrast means that they’re typically not very detailed) and it helps stop you from getting lost in perfectly replicating the photo. In my opinion, anyway.
Right — there it all is. For a post heavy on visual inspiration I probably should have posted some photos of my sketches and references but maybe that’s a project for another time. Thanks for reading — this was a fun exercise in trying to get more comfortable talking openly about romance, erotic art and also just writing blog stuff again.
What else am I up to lately…
Releasing a new role for Good Society, The Impostor, inspired by The Talented Mr Ripley (art by the amazing Cris del Carmen)
Playtesting the spinoffs of Thinly Veiled, including Within the Walls (the haunted house one) and Blood & Magic (the gothic fantasy one that needs a better name), and playtesting my romance novel emulation game
Reading Design Or Perish, an excellent TTRPG design blog by my friend Misha Grifka Wander, no I am not biased it’s really good!
Reading Jeannie Lin’s The Lotus Palace, Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale, and Jan Cohn’s Romance and the Erotics of Property
Replaying Sunless Skies (and watching SVU/rewatching The Strain or 30 Rock while I play it)
Listening to my personal faves cut of The Tortured Poets Department