Dirty Little Drawings: The Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop | 
| Creators: Harvey Redding, Robert W. Richards, Rob Hugh Rosen, Joris Buiks
Publisher: Bruno Gmunder Verlag Gmbh
Category: Book
List Price: $42.50
Buy New: $28.05
You Save: $14.45 (34%)
Rating:  5 reviews
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 320
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 6.7 x 6.6 x 1.3
ISBN: 3861874482
Dewey Decimal Number: 743
EAN: 9783861874485
ASIN: 3861874482
Publication Date: November 30, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A visual experiment by a number of New York artists - intoxicating! New York City six years ago - a small group of fourteen young restless gay artists joined forces. Frustrated that the drawing courses on offer only had nude models in academic poses they decide to take matters into their own hands. Thus the QUEER MEN'S EROTIC ART WORKSHOP was born! In the following years the group expanded to almost 100 gay artists and their collaboration proved to be quite fruitful. Together they produced around 12,000 drawings - DIRTY LITTLE DRAWINGS. This anthology is the outstanding result of this inspiring project. It is also a fascinating glimpse into New York's gay subculture on an impressive 320 pages. It's a very revealing book full of sexual tension and is a lovely slice of gay emancipation! This book will defi nitely make quite a splash!
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| Customer Reviews:
ONE HOT LITTLE BOOK July 8, 2008
Floyd S. Watson
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Dirty Little Drawings is a wonderful book full of erotic drawings featuring the male body in every concievable way. The erotic poses are wonderful! If you are considering buying some books of illustrations, some of the artists have books of their own, so you can kind of preview their work to see if you want more.
I would hardly call this a little book, as it weighs in at 322 pages! Also, as you turn the pages over a period of time, you seem to discover more and more little nasty things you missed the first time through...YUM!
 Men, Men, Men... February 26, 2008
JOEY C. ROBINSON (Tarpon Springs, FL USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
When purchasing the book, I was not aware of the background of the process of how the artwork was created for a show. Turning the pages of the book is like walking through a gallery. A small portable gallery of Male Erotic Art.
An Amazing Collection at an Amazing Value January 4, 2008
Eric C. Rawlins (Manhattan, NY/Rutherford, NJ United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Aficionados of male figurative art come in many shapes and sizes; Dirty Littly Drawings will appeal to all of them. For those tired of the same old insipid, slick, hackneyed photo spreads in the stroke mags, Dirty Little Drawings is a welcome departure: this little book will kick-start your libido like a juiced-up set of jumper cables. Even the looser, sketchier, more abstract pieces radiate an intense sexuality, the boldness of their lines and headiness of their colours imbuing the images with more sensuality than most photography can muster. Whether your fascination is for fine art in general, super-charged erotic imagery, or something to "hang over the sofa," this book has something for you.
One of the greatest assets of this collection is its enormous variety of subject matter, styles, and media. In its 320 pages, Dirty Little Drawings houses a stable of 291 images, created by 72 artists, ranging from delicate, slender, coming-of-age youths to improbably muscled and impossibly endowed muscle gods to down-and-dirty leather daddies and their slaves. Dirty Little Drawings also pulls no punches in the action its images depict, with vivid representations of just about every scene imaginable (the only acts missing are those of the yellow- and brown-stripe variety). Providing a point of context, some of the drawings even depict the models in situ, giving the viewer a privileged glimpse into both the Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop's clandestine, underground lair and the process itself.
In terms of artistic styles, DLD contains a wide range: Max Ernst-ish pen-and-ink caricatures, Old Master-style charcoal and pencil studies, delicate French Academie/Prud'hon-like compositions, Fauvist crayon abstractions, Expressionist/Egon Schiele-inspired watercolours, and photorealistic coloured pencil pieces. Some funky images decorated with metallic ink scrawls even call to mind Keith Haring's work. Although very few of the pieces could be considered masterworks (limited primarily by their requisite small size), the general level of craftsmanship is high, and many of the artists are clearly at the top of their game here.
The majority of the pieces are done on coloured armatures, from delicately hued pastel papers to Bristol board laden with op art-intense acrylics, but the black-and-white images are no less striking. Tai Lin, the artist whose work graces the cover, achieves an incredibly striking, luminescent effect with an extremely limited chromatic palette of pastels on black paper, while Enrico Gomez creates works of sublime sensuality and ethereal vagueness using lines of graphite and charcoal smudges nibbled away by kneaded eraser on cream-coloured Strathmore paper. Other artists, such as Chuck Nitzberg, achieve an extraordinary effect by combing the two methods, working for the most part monochromatically, with a few accents of colour - bright orange cock heads, blazing-red nipples, etc. - to highlight the points of interest. Although oil paint as a medium is absent (canvas loaded with oil paint being too heavy for the exhibition's hanging requirements), some of the pastel images do attain a painterly quality in their play and blending of colour and looseness of strokes.
My only complaints would be that Tai Lin's hauntingly arresting portrait, which graces the cover, is not reproduced anywhere within the book - on the cover, it's obscured by the title and list of artists' names. It also would have been nice if the artists' names were reprinted in list form inside the book as well, along with contact information for purchasing and commissioning purposes - one can only get a complete listing of the artists by combing through the index pages in the back. Also, the lack of page numbers or artist names beneath the full-size images makes it difficult to find one's favourite pieces. While it is arguably preferable to have the reproductions cover the entire page as they do here, thereby increasing their immediacy, it does make it difficult to identify the pieces (an index at the back of the book reprints each as a thumbnail in the order it appears in the book, along with the artist's name, but since the pages are not numbered, the viewer can only approximate where in the book each piece appears based on its order in the index). Finally, while Dirty Little Drawings was clearly created with exceptionally high production values, with a heavy, rock-solid cover and thick, glossy paper stock, the slight sheen on the pages makes it a little difficult to get a clear view of the artwork - one has to tilt the book just so to minimize the glare.
Despite these minor flaws, though, Dirty Little Drawings is an incredibly eye- (and zipper-) opening treasure trove of newcomers to and icons in the gay erotic art scene that perfectly captures the phenomenon that is the Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop. In purely sensual terms, the book has a satisfying heft to it, the relatively small size makes it feel personal, private, even covetable, the cover and pages have a sumptuous texture (almost naughty, like satin sheets), and the quality of construction and artwork contained therein make it feel like it's worth a good deal more than Amazon is currently charging for it. It makes a great gift...just make sure you get an extra copy to keep for yourself!
(Note: To keep this review short, I have appended it in the Comments section with detailed information about the physical aspects of the book, as well as a brief history of the Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop and background information on the exhibit from which the book's images were drawn - hope it's of use!)
A magnificent book to place on your bedroom end table... January 2, 2008
Daniel W. Kelly (Long Island, NY United States)
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
Don't let the compact dimensions of this erotic art book fool you. Inside, each individual page is filled with a stunning slice of erotic imagery. The whole concept of this book is wonderful and exciting in itself...when you look at this art, you can just imagine the atmosphere in the studio where real men posed in these explicit positions, surrounded by a group of artists who splashed across a page their own interpretations of the fantasies frozen before them.
A Surprisingly Rich Treasure Trove December 10, 2007
Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States)
16 out of 17 found this review helpful
The book DIRTY LITTLE DRAWINGS is an artwork in itself. Measuring about 6 1/2" by 6 1/2" it not only contains some superb art but it also serves as a catalogue for a project from a unique event that began in December 2000. Harvey Redding hired an adventuresome model and posed for a group of fourteen artists, each of whom sketched and drew from the model's input 'to expand the boundaries of academic nude figure drawing,' - 'full out, rock hard, unapologetic, sexual posing: nothing held back, nothing sacred.' The result was a collection of gay erotic art that became an exhibition of art works identically sized and priced. The exhibition and sale was so successful that there have been subsequent shows creating a collectors' dream and a new New York art scene.
This book may be small in size, but the artworks are vigorous, erotically charged and visually stunning. They range from simple head portraits to S and M influenced scenes, sex acts, and coupling and solitary pleasures. The variety of art types ranges form the hastily sketched pencil or crayon outline to fastidiously detailed drawings. The quality of the works may vary in degree of craftsmanship, but this selection of richly colorful works has one thing in common: the works are full of sensual energy.
The book and the concept are the work of Harvey Redding, Robert W. Richards, and Rob Hugh Rosen, the three directors of the Queer Men's Erotic Art Workshop in New York. The book is produced with finesse by Bruno Gmunder Verlag Gmbh. This is a fine art collection that started out to be a reaction to academic art. It is a superb little book! Grady Harp, December 07
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