To my readers......

SITE UPDATE NOTICE

Thanks for visiting mitchmen, home of Mitchell's Gay Art

The Caps and Collars/ Flat Cap Gang story at Google Groups is on a summer break until July. (see Group News for link)

Message updated 25th June 2023

Saturday 28 May 2016

A-Z of Fetish Artists - Waldo

Waldo - Fenced
This French artist's work is focussed on spanking, drawn and painted with fresh colours in a comic book style with a slightly retro-feel not unlike that used by Nikolaas for his rather darker subject matter. The clothing likewise reflects it's time but I like the traditional shorts suggesting a jogger on his morning run taking a short cut where he shouldn't!

Waldo - Cellar Time

If you enlarge this image you will see that this man's face has a classical quality like the statues of Greek and Roman antiquity and it shares the rather lifeless eyes that often characterise those works. You don't get a strong sense of personality or that this artist admires men or sees them as powerful, sensual or sexual objects. I'd be a bit worried about what's going to happen to the plumbing if the spanker really gets going!
 
Waldo - Belt Loop
 
This is a very simple image but captures rather skillfully the curve of the belt as it circles round the the subject's body and cock. The indentations produced in both areas show a tight, restraining fit. I'm not sure this arrangement is achieveable with a conventional belt design though! 
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The majority of this artist's work features female participants as both tops and bottoms. If you are not averse to such content you will find plenty of it very easily with search engines.

 For more articles in this series click on the A-Z label below or search for specific artists using the index page or search boxes (top right)

Wednesday 11 May 2016

A-Z of Fetish Artists - Waistband

 Waistband - Y-Front Fantasy

Waistband - Ass Worship

Two images by an artist I know only as 'Waistband' and involving the worship of traditional white men's underwear. Many of us cut our teeth on gear like this, advertised in store catalogues. Functional underwear that isn't pretending to be anything else and is not meant to be seen makes the wearer look particularly undressed whenever it does see the light of day. 

There's memories of the famous Y-Front marque in the first picture although I can't recall ever seeing variants with a button fly like that depicted here. The second image portrays something more like the Calvin Klein revival style. Both varieties provide the glorious rear view that only comes with a modest capacious fit and high waist. This inbuilt characteristic of modesty makes the man who wears it all the more challenging and intriguing and sightings of him in his underwear acquire a rarity value.

This artist has his own distinctive 'woodcut' style that gives these images credibility. If anyone can supply more information about him (via comments) I'd be glad to hear from you.

If you like looking at men in this style of underwear have a look at my series 'In Praise of Y-Fronts'

 
For more articles in this series click on the A-Z label below or search for specific artists using the index page or search boxes (top right)

Friday 6 May 2016

A-Z of Fetish Artists - Waelon



Randy Waelon produced extraordinary pictures in the 90’s showing deadly conflicts and tortures involving knives, spears, arrows, stakes and similar pre-industrial weaponry. Most of it is too extreme for this blog although it would pass without comment in a Hollywood film.


This chariot example is one of his milder images conjuring up a fantasy of primitive enslavement. His characters exhibit lean muscularity and distinct but varied ethnicities which are well-observed and without any hint of caricature. Are these two hapless explorers who have fallen into the hands of some secret group with their own unique customs and values? This type of storyline gets a bad press because of its mistaken assignment to certain parts of the ‘undeveloped’ world. We all know that real life ‘lost tribes’ seem to be peaceful and friendly to point of naivety. But the theme of encountering the possibly hostile unknown has a universal significance and these days it’s more likely to re-appear dressed up in post-holocaust trappings. It works fine as an allegory of entering gay life and other unpredictable ‘social worlds’.

 
Waelon drew a notable set of images showing similar tribesmen in a jungle setting, dressed only in loincloths and meeting gruesome ends in battle or captivity. 
The absence of any overt eroticism in these pictures places them in a distinct category which arguably has nothing to do with fetish at all, but who can fathom the human mind?


His output is not restricted to such Tarzanesque fantasies; there are examples of modern settings and black ethnicity too, which is depicted above with an uncompromising but inoffensive authenticity and authority that only an insider could carry off. This is a detail of a larger picture.

Stylistically Waelon has the skills of a professional illustrator and the attention to detail (like the neck of the captive above) shows a preoccupation with realism that goes beyond, in fact goes against, the normal requirements of erotica. 

I can’t find any reference to him on the web and the challenging nature of his imagery means that public postings don’t stay around long , you may track him down in membership groups like GMBA (see sidebar).

Tuesday 3 May 2016

More Than It Seems



This stylish image by Wally Rainbow mades an interesting prelude to the letter 'W' in my A-Z of Fetish Artists which is starting soon. The artist is a prolific producer of romantic cartoon art but this image is a bit more interesting than that. For a start the main character is quite a nice representative of manhood (a depiction which reflects the Italian background of the artist). There's also an obvious fetish element (domination and whipping) even if, like me, you're not interested in little blue men. 

But this image has an additional appeal that is quite hard to define at first. The theme of a man carrying a demon on his shoulders who constantly punishes him has a distinguished and pretty much universal literary ancestry. Wikipaedia calls it the shoulder demon it pops up in Japanese legends and modern fantasy fiction where goblins abound. You don't have to be a psychologist to recognise the significance of the symbolism and it's relevance to personalities you know, the expression 'driven' seems most apt in this context.   

Seeing the demon with a whip in his hand also makes me wonder if this offers an insight into the origins of our own interests in S&M, but it's a bit early in the day to explore this idea!


Wally Rainbow has a blog called Lightelf which covers other atists work as well as his own.