Like many practitioners of "Life Drawing", over the years I have collected a broad set of tools and techniques for capturing that moment on paper. I am also a digital artist, and deeply fascinated by the process of using software and digital input tools to create art. I've been drawing on the iPad and iPad2 using the various drawing APPs available for a while now. Here's some examples of the impressive results one can obtain using the Digital Tablet for life-drawing with a model.

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Claudio Bravo was a master 'hyper realist' painter, known more for his quasi-mystical imagery and his stunningly realistic depictions of the figure. He was an extremely gifted artist on the front lines of a surge of contemporary Spanish realists, who all looked back to masters such as Velazquez and Francisco Zurbaran for their inspiration, all the while dealing with subject matter relevant to their time.

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Lilianne Milgrom will be reporting on the nude in art and the nude AS art in a series entitled The Body and Beyond. Her exhibition reviews will focus not only on the artist's choice of the nude image, but will also be cognizant of the public's response to these works. She is particularly interested in what these reactions say about the cultural, religious and sexual mores of a society.

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Jasad
An “Arab Spring” for
the Nude?
By Scott Goodwillie

With the Middle East in turmoil again - this time with Social Media fueled explosion called the Arab Spring - we hold our breaths and hope for a new openness in governance and hopefully social attitudes within the Arab world. Enter the art/literary magazine JASAD, which launched in 2008. The launch of this publication was a courageous act of literary expression, and we here at TheGreatNude applaud the publisher's efforts.

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Nakha Chitra is not exactly a common term in the art world, with it's roots in ancient Sanskrit, Nakha meaning fingernail, Chitra means art and Nakhachitrakar means fingernail artist. Not as simple as embossing, this is a rare Indian art form in which there is a reverse process happening not only with the image being created with pressure on the back of the paper but with the basic concept of drawing itself.

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For many who watched the BRAVO series "Work of Art/The Next Great Artist", Peregrine Honig was a favored "competitor" with wide range of skills for making art. What many did not know, was that Honig was already a successful artist with a following and several museums in possession of her works. Honig has long been exploring the boundaries of culture with works that make provocative use of the nude figure.

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Lilianne Milgrom sets out to uncover the Washington DC art scene beyond the venerable Smithsonian museums. She didn't need to scratch too far below the surface to discover a vibrant art community dedicated to the traditions of the nude in art.

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PPOW Gallery
Bo Bartlett: Paintings of Home

In his recent exhibition at PPOW Gallery in New York, Bo Bartlett offered up some stunning compositions in the form of large scale paintings and drawings which are culled from his personal and professional life. Born in Columbus, Georgia, he depicts a world of stillness and intimacy which owes much to the insights of Andrew Wyeth, who was his friend and mentor.

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Australia has definitely come a long way in its acceptance and appreciation of the nude in art. Today, Australian artists are internationally recognized for pushing the envelope, and the country boasts a robust collector base. No matter what your taste in art, one can be sure to find it in abundance Down Under.

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While perusing for artists in a Google search several months ago, I happened across the drawings of Evan Spiridellis. On his personal blog he published a wonderful collection of quick gestural pen and ink drawings of nudes, created across a span of time.

Evan's name might be unknown to many, but his company, which he runs with his brother Gregg, is named JibJab. There are many, many fans of this quirky animation studio's satirical, political animations out there, trust me. These guys are an amazingly talented and funny bunch of people. Who knew they also enjoyed drawing the Nude?

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Of the dozens of international artists chosen to have their works broadcast during the series, two artists were exhibitors at TheGreatNude Invitational exhibition in May 2010, artist Richard T. Scott and Jeffrey Wiener, artist and publisher of TheGreatNude.tv.

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The Body and Beyond
By Lilianne Milgrom

Our newest editorial contributor, Lilianne Milgrom, will be reporting on the nude in art and the nude AS art in a series entitled The Body and Beyond. We'll follow her travels around the world in 2011 in her search for the next Great Nude.

She personally experienced this cacophony of divergent opinions during her recent stint at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris as the authorized copyist of Gustav Courbet's 1866 masterwork L'origine du monde (The Origin of the World).

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A relative unknown in the United States, 27 year old Iranian native painter is taking the traditional nude in different directions with her charged dreamscapes, filled with symbolism and personal imagery.

When The Great Nude.TV came across her work at the 2008 Asian Contemporary Art Fair we were immediately drawn to the expressive qualities of her recent paintings, and the powerful use of the human form in her symbolism and personal narrative. Represented by LTMH Gallery domestically, we are fortunate to be able to interview Nazanin about her work.

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When most people are asked to describe an artistic genius, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso is often cited as an example. In addition to his undeniable creative talents and the large body of excellent work produced in his lifetime, his whole career appears to have been a successful strategy of exploration and risk-taking at just the right moment in history.

Most people associate Picasso with his groundbreaking abstractions of reality, and we are all familiar with the story of an artist emboldened by ambition and natural talent, who changed the definition of art. This is not an article about the journey of an artistic genius through his well-known career. Instead, I'd like to take you on a tour of an artist who used the nude figure to communicate the essence of human nature, and did so with courage and freedom throughout all of the phases of his long career.

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Best known for work that nearly defined the "Pin-up", Alberto Vargas is recognized for depicting and perfecting the image of female sexuality in the first half of the 20th century. Having worked with Esquire and more famously Playboy magazines, some would be quick to write Vargas off as a soft pornographer, and he’s never expressed any shame in that. However, from the perspective of TheGreatNude, Vargas was an artist dedicated to the figure, and produced a body of work that embodied the meaning of female sexuality and in effect became standards of feminine desire for a generation of American men.

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