In art school, his naked-man fantasias were dismissed as frivolous — even as he continued to win scholarship after scholarship.

“I took delight in horrifying all the tutors with naked bodies and massive dicks,” says British artist Matthew Stradling. “The images had filtered into my work from porno magazines. The tutors were all serious academics. Their concerns were for the very dry, almost scientific aspects of art, which I really had no time for. I wanted to see SENSUALITY and I wanted to see it BIG! It was my coming out as an artist.”

Stradling had not always been so confident. As an undergraduate in the 1980’s , he was still struggling with his homosexuality. “”My work was very camp but not yet homoerotic.” It was only after he won a British Academy Scholarship to study for a Masters Degree that Stradling decided to let it rip, to paint, without apology, buff male beauty set in a world of pearls, rubies and beautiful nautilus-shell swirls. A body of work he would later call his Luxuria paintings.

“I had the whole history of art behind me,” recalls Stradling, now 42. “Michelangelo, Carravagio, Botticelli and Da Vinci. I wanted to reclaim the enormous effect their sexuality had on their work and define a gay aesthetic.

“I suppose my work was quite political. Art school, surprisingly, had quite a macho atmosphere, and I was refusing to let homosexuality be swept under the carpet. So I refined my technical skills by studying the Old Masters.”

“I was fascinated by the pearly quality of flesh that Rubens achieved in his work. I read up on him and discovered that he worked from warm dark colors, then built up transparent layers until he reached the pure white highlights of flesh. I wanted that same sense that the body was warm and alive under the pale skin.”

It was this Old Masters precision, says Stradling, that made the paintings impossible to dismiss — even as they were accused of being kitsch. “Many of my fellow students were in a Conceptual Art no-mans land, but to my surprise, they really appreciated my work and leapt to my defense whenever I was criticized for being frivolous.” It was the tutors who lead the charge against the work. “They wouldn’t even talk to me,” says Stradling. They did, however, give him the highest grades, even as they shuddered.

But judge these magnificent paintings for yourself. Frivolous? Kitsch? Or, actually, Conceptual Art doing a complete revolution back to literal representation?

When we look at these works it is not merely the Old Masters of the West we see, but those of the East. The gems and rich fabrics, the seductive curving lines, the languorous outlay of flesh suggest an almost colonial, 19th century fascination with Orientalia. We see in the Luxuria paintings not just Rubens but Byzantium with its jewel-encrusted icons, India with its harems and palaces, the fairytale Arabia of a Thousand and One Nights.

“From Eastern art, I take a strong earthy erotic impulse and from the Christian West, a sense of spiritual awe that has much to do with light and transfiguration. It annoys me that religion denies the sexual impulse. After all, the closest most of us get to religious ecstasy is in sex.”

“I try to find the link between sex and spirituality in my painting. I did a whole series of sexual icons — in which penises are haloed in gems, sperm becomes pearls, light pours out of anuses. It was a way to poke fun at formal religion, yet at the same time place sex back in the center of the sacred altar.”

Running alongside Stradling’s highly finished technique is a certain post-Pop, post-modern literalism: The faces of these models are contemporary and specific, rather than idealized. They are taken, with little filtering, from physique magazines, porn models for hire, and newspapers.

“My Broken Man ( below right) really haunts people. I got the image from a newspaper. I was on the metro and someone opposite me was reading a paper which had this image of a beautiful man with his nose all smashed up — the vulnerability of a defeated man really attracted me and I had to paint it. I asked the person if I could have the back page of their newspaper and they obliged.

“Several years later I had the painting hanging in my apartment. A burglar broke in. Cleaned the place out, took every painting but one — the Broken Man. He was the survivor. This painting like I said has a mysterious and haunting quality. Something about the quality of the paint, it’s light, the rawness of the image.”

We agree. Broken Man has the charm of an on-the-spot snapshot and an undercurrent of something else. Something poetic. A defeated man who isn’t at all defeated.

And then after many years of making a name as a painter of luxury and
earth-bound Apollos, things changed.

“I found myself bored of painting gorgeous boys against luscious backgrounds. I felt as if I was pandering to an obsessive body culture in the gay world. The art niche I had created for myself had become increasingly commercial and empty. I rebelled against the Luxuria work. I began to create stark empty backgrounds where the viewer is forced to contemplate a single figure, sometimes in a quite challenging way.

‘Nudity, for me, now expressed something other than desire. The body was vulnerable, tender. Hand gestures, the expression in the eyes seemed to show me a sadness in human existence. My self-portrait Passing Through (right) is an example of the stunned way I felt. The horror in the expression was the horror of hollowness — a feeling that everything that had meant something to me had suddenly lost its meaning.

“I went on to paint candid portraits of my parents naked — as a homage to them and also as a way of contemplating where I had come from and where I was going.

In Father (above) I painted my father as is — untweaked, unadorned. It’s an honest painting and a premonition of myself when I am old. It was very important to paint the body of an old man, as well. Seldom is the naked male celebrated in old age, and I wanted to do that

“I now am in a place where I work in both styles — the luxurious and the stark. Strangely, I find few who like both styles. Those who love the luxuriant tend to be horrified by the stark and those who favor the stark look down on the luxuriant. It’s a psychoanalyst’s battlefield!”

Well, Matthew, count Nightcharm among the wise fans who like everything you do.

You can find more information about
Matthew Stradling at
Matthew Stradling online.

Paintings available for purchase at
Adonis Art of London

Matthew Stradling also accepts private commissions. (”And anyone who fancies being a model is welcome to contact me,” says the artist.)

This December Matthew (right)
will be featured in a mixed show called Face Value at the Chelsea Art Gallery in Palo Alto, California.