American Artist – Mitchell Pluto

Six Erotic Artists

Neon Bubble Butt. JC Bravo 2017, Mitchell Pluto Collection

JC Bravo

My favorite Bravo pink pen drawing is the 2017 Neon Bubble Butt. I find it enjoyable because the curvy female buttocks are a universal icon of beauty and perfection. It’s a fixed shape drifting in space. Just as helium makes things float and feel light, the drawing has a whimsical, festive quality to it. This drawing makes me think of how ideas can lift your spirits.

Juan Carlos Bravo, a Miami artist, is all about sensuality in his art. Miami is a melting pot of cultures, fashion, and the adult film industry. The sensuality in Bravo’s art makes it a favorite among collectors. He paints voluptuous women who embody an ageless ideal of sex appeal.

Surrealism, body horror, and pop culture blend to create the world of Bravo’s women. His art inspires viewers to examine their own primal instincts and their significance.

In this intimate scaled ballpoint pen drawing, I return once more to the private theater of the bedroom, a liminal space where desire, memory, and mortality quietly collide.

At the center kneels a voluptuous woman, her impossibly long red hair spilling like wine across her body, an oneiric cascade that measures both time and temptation. She raises her arms in a gesture of languid surrender, unaware, or perhaps deliberately unseeing, the woman wearing a jeweled Mardi Gras mask that transforms her into a carnival Venus. Thigh-high stockings, striped in defiant rainbow colors, root her to the earthly even as the rest of her body dissolves into roseate light. On the bed beside her, a cat and perennial guardian spirit, sits in calm, wide-eyed judgment, the only creature in the room who truly sees everything.

Above them hangs a gold framed erotic painting, its subject bent in mirror-image submission, a quiet reminder that every act of looking is also an act of being looked at. And in the lower right corner, half-hidden beneath the sheets, grins a human skull, my memento mori. It is not a threat but an invitation: remember that you will die, so love fiercely, look shamelessly, touch without apology while flesh is still warm and hair still grows.

The entire scene is drenched in an artificial pink and magenta glow, the color of stage lights, fever dreams, and cheap motel neon, a hue that makes the skin feel simultaneously hyperreal and hallucinatory. Through this saturated lens, the everyday becomes ritual, the intimate becomes mythic, and a simple moment of morning undress is revealed as a dance on the edge of oblivion.

-JC Bravo

**The Eternal Zaftig, Pink Ball Point Drawings of JC Bravo** https://shungagallery.com/jc-bravo-art/

Bravo paints the human body with anatomical precision. He features both realistic bodies and integrates stylistic elements reflecting augmentation. Technical detail is a priority in his work. He’s passionate about oil painting and uses a pink pen for his drawings.

Philip Henderson

Among Henderson’s many drawings, I like Tyra the best. The figure’s eyes hold my attention. I think she saw me looking at her hand. I can tell she’s aware of my attraction through her gaze. The outline of her body forms a simple path, gently sloping from breast to thigh. Her hair almost blends with her pubic hair, but a delicate crescent shape separates them above the mons pubis. Tyra’s arm movement guide your eyes across her body. In Henderson’s artwork, eye contact and pose combine to create a feeling of empathetic sex appeal.

**Big Beautiful Women, The Phat Art of Philip Henderson** https://shungagallery.com/philip-henderson-fat-girls/

Curvy fetishes play a significant role in the themes of Philip Henderson. His plush illustrations create an arresting experience for the viewer. Henderson celebrates the value of curvy women. Henderson’s book, “Extreme Curves and Phat Girls”, achieved international success.

Besides his erotic illustrations, Henderson is a gifted writer of essays, novels, and poetry. He achieves elegance through his scholarly, artistic style. Henderson avoids abstraction in his anatomical figures while blending idealism and realism, creating a believable fantasy. He portrays natural grace and confidence in his figures, excluding any cosmetic enhancements.

Angélique Danielle Bègue

Bègue’s 2009 work, Dans Mon Corps, includes “Deni d’humanité,” a piece with a prophetic theme. In the image, AI’s exploitation disrupts the natural flow with sexual intrusion. This image illustrates AI replicating itself using humans. Her art shows how the excitement around AI is really just more of the same old ways of controlling us. Bègue’s work examines the way narrative influences our understanding of what’s real and imagined. I appreciate looking at this image because it makes me question the idea of human originality and imitation.

**Ghosts From the Id: The Art of Angélique Bègue** https://shungagallery.com/angelique-begue/

French painter Angélique Danielle Bègue’s artistic career started with tempera, apprenticed at Gorze Priory by an Orthodox nun. A classic style is the vehicle for Bègue’s modern concepts. France acknowledges her contribution to the revival of tempera painting. Bègue’s professional experience includes erotic modeling.

An icon painting from my dear friend Angélique Danielle Bègue from France.

In her figurative art, Bègue merges a traditional religious style with contemporary themes. Her artwork uses vibrant tones, layers, and bold lines. Bègue’s iconic graphic design employs strategic contrasts to
create visual balance and proportion. She uses painting to express her internal fantasies. Bègue dedicates herself to understanding sexual fantasies and how to approach topics society deems taboo.

Miriam Cahn

Äffin’s unsettling nature is thought-provoking to me. Simian aspects of the image contribute to its dreamlike quality while exposing a liminal personality. The skin is smooth around the breasts but gets hairier and tactile near the pelvis. The vulva is a fiery bush, sparking primal metaphors. This work compels me to explore the roots of human consciousness and how language shapes our understanding, including our desires. It suggests to me that the ideas of elegance and ugliness are mental constructs.
The intense emotion evoked by this painting stems from Cahn’s ability to communicate deep thought through candid visual images.

**Miriam Cahn: Probing Boundary Lines and Surfaces**
https://shungagallery.com/miriam-cahn-swiss-artist/

Swiss artist Miriam Cahn paints in a Neo-post-expressionist style. Her art reflects the movement’s style through her figures, colors, and emotional expression. Cahn’s work often features spectral figures with
watchful eyes. Viewers become the subjects of the gaze of the eyes in her paintings.

Cahn’s paintings are vibrant and full of bright pastel colors. She discovers new things about herself through painting. With raw concepts, she develops a visual vocabulary for emotions. Her paintings are unpolished and invite the viewer into a world that’s flawed.

Viktor Alexandrovich Lyapkalo

The reason I like Lyapkalo’s paintings is his choice of female subjects. It’s that simple. I’m attracted to curvy women, and his artwork features them. This painting captivates me in every way. The man, cat, and samovar create a muted, somber atmosphere, in contrast to the woman. Her lively body seems to glow with light and color. She’s appealing because of her open and generous nature, which brightens the room. Lyapkalo’s representation of the smile has a seductive effect on the viewer. The piece illustrates the duality of affection, showing both its open and concealed aspects.

**States of Figuration, a Correspondence with Viktor Lyapkalo**
https://shungagallery.com/viktor-lyapkalo-nudes/

Russian artist Viktor Lyapkalo paints in a strong social realist style. His paintings of women are sensual and playful. Lyapkalo’s skill with figures and academic paintings is the key to his success. His artwork portrays the emotion and character of the people he paints.

During my interview with Lyapkalo, he compared painting skin to an onion flower, highlighting its multi-hued nature. This is evident upon closer examination of the colors used in the artist’s depictions of nude women.

Pablo Picasso

This image remains my most memorable. In sex, artist and model become unified. I am drawn to this picture because it features both intercourse and a suggestive representation of the sexual act through the artist’s palette. As a flawless masterpiece of line, this image is everlasting.

I found Avant-Garde Magazine, No. 8. Picasso’s Erotic Gravures on my parent’s bookshelf. It was between Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” and Louise Huebner’s “Power Through Witchcraft”. For a kid stuck reading boring schoolbooks, I finally stumbled on something cool.

The thin book, Picasso’s Gravures, contained his sexually suggestive sketches. Picasso’s drawings are gestural. His lines make his art look like it’s being fondled. Many illustrations displayed surfaces marred by hairiness, crinkling and stretch marks.

The lines create a curious interplay of dryness and wetness. Picasso’s suggestive drawings in the 1970s opened the door for other artists to explore explicit themes. He owned a collection of sixty-one Shunga prints. Picasso’s interest in Shunga is a key theme in the chapter “Artist and his Model”.

An example of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shunga

“A lot of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century shunga books contain enlarged images of male and female genitals, occasionally while engaged in the sexual act. These kind of ‘close-up’ designs were intended to provide instruction about anatomy and how to give pleasure. These educational images are mostly found immediately following the other illustrations in shunga books. Such prints are modeled after older versions that were used to teach human anatomy, which showed different shapes of male and female organs.” -Marijn Kruijff, Editor of Shunga gallery Erotic Art Magazine and is the foremost authority on shunga art.

**Striking Close-Up Intercourse Designs As Portrayed in Shunga Art** https://shungagallery.com/close-up-intercourse/

written by Mitchell Pluto 2025

Buried Painting

Harvesting a buried painting from the earth in late October 2023. oil/collage/bone

the imagined belief interrupts the critical factor

official technocrats announced Monday

that holography can work on what you already paid for

…but you know how that goes

holography sounds a lot like

bending a staff into waves

I’m more interested in the laser

the Zia

that doesn’t encounter a time barrier or any irrelevance

surrounded by dated marks

it is melody and musical notation

hear a tune play about shifting the strain in forms

edges and interior angles melt

motion flooded gliding parts

burying older gadgets

add another page and layer to the landfill

another brief still life surface spoiled

oracles from the underworld tell us the future will be claimed by an unidentified cosmic object

so meet the smartest item that answers and restricts further editing

an open object without vain intention and meddling interpolation

while equipment that silently lacks possessiveness

lays cradled in dirt that grows

© Mitchell Pluto 11/4/2023

Shanta Lee, The Topography of One’s Body

What does it mean to have secrets as the topography of one’s body?

It is true, not all secrets are created equal. Some add a sway to the hips while others…well…they are a poison that eat us from the inside out.

I’m Tellin’

All unsaids, All secrets are not created equal. Some secrets kin with our bodies because our bodies know that they need to be the safe, the harbor for such things. This is not about that. Some secrets turn a walk, a regular gait to a saunter because the body tastes its sweetness. This is not about that. Certain kinds of othas, secrets that is, well….they bloom somethin else, the poison that eats us from the inside out.

This be bout dat. Dat latter kind. Dat otha kind.

It’s not just in the toxic we trust. We grow. We throw seeds. We replicate it.

When I was a child , there was a statement that we would say that would check the perceived wrong doer. It would be something like, ’Oooooh, I’m tellin.’ What precedes the ‘tellin’ is the series of oooo’s mixed with the arrangement of vowels and consonants after that short phrase all together, in sum, in calculation, may make the 24 million miles long tail of Hailey’s comet green-eyed.

I’m tellin’ was a threat.

It was to check the doer who was already in deep doin wrong. It was a nod to the way one was willing to betray secrets, willing to betray the real monster who hid under covers.

The tellers of the toxic became the snitches, the snitches is who we said would get stitches In those streets

What does it mean to have secrets as the topography of one’s body?

Be damned, dare stitches, dare the can of whoops ass…I’m tellin.’

No threat…but invocation

Viens

Viens ici

Je ne te l’ai jamais dit mais

Oui je l’ai fait

Gwendolyn said it best, “…Even if you are not ready for the day,

It will not always be night.” By not ready, we mean whatever you are holding.
Whatever is hiding within the folds and wrinkles and twists of
unmade beds.
Whatever is being passed across through invisible notes

All ink doesn’t vanish. Some just wears…refusin’ ignoring

By not ready, we mean through the hush of phone calls.
The phone calls that contain whispers.
The phone calls that have no phone lines that require that and only THAT one other person picks up the receiver

The thing that returns to the pit spiraled tight behind the spiral of the belly’s button. The thing that makes it feel like each look by another means they know it because of the way it reads on the body. Tethered and bound. Whatever it is that you are holding and hoping that the sun won’t beat you to it…It’s coming

Je le referais

Je le referais juste pour le chemin

What if we said that the keepers of that kinda…. are the sleepers who never awake. What if we said we will nail their coffins shut

And forbid them from wake. What if we flipped the script on the secret keepers, the pain dwellers, all gates and their guards,

The bottom feeders who feed on the toxic blooms, the corpse eaters who grow fat full and bloated off the bodies that become emaciated from thoooose kinda secrets

What if…We take their power back. We read the topography of the secret laden body and become fluent. Armed with the tongues that know how to untaste poison, daggers in hand.

We the kind who realllll good with the way the sun sneaks up, how it creeps from behind the curtains of dark. The heat, we feel it on our shoulders. We refuse to hide from the way it will come get us

Nous avons tous été pese

Nous sommes toujours trouve…voulant

Nous ne pouvons pas le nier

Something about the way a secret taste

Jevu hu fair sa—

Shanta Lee Gander is an artist and multi-faceted professional. As an artist, her endeavors include writing prose, poetry, investigative journalism, and photography. Her poetry, prose, and personal essays have been featured in The Crisis Magazine, Rebelle Society, and on the Ms. Magazine Blog.

Exhibitions

Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine February 2022 – Spring 2023 * Fleming Museum of Art

Books

Black Metamorphoses (Etruscan Press, 2023)

GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA (Diode Editions)

Dreamin of Mama While Trying to Speak Woman in Woke Tongues

Shanta Lee, MBA, MFA Shantalee.com * (802) 275 – 8152

Four Poems by Heller Levinson

The light of old things, of beautiful old things, awoke in me.
                                                -- Sherwood 
Anderson
                                                                                                                                                                             

swathes wash-lift, titillative
	fibers twine through time,
		tangle through grasses, air,
			the storied
			the beheld

these old pliers, bruised, complacent,
loose, slackened by the exigencies
of labor, the perfume of application

seasoned armchair yellowing from
the fade of multitude, stuffed 
with the mnemonics of repose, the
armature of provision

spattering through the long cornfields sacred vessels
spring alive, drink the oil of the
corn, flutter to the western winds

things patinated,
	foamingricketyhistorical,

flux-chugging


Abyssal Eros

techy		telltale		totem
	odiferous refract
 calligraphic concert 

	a matter of teeth
upwards & out

doesn’t anyone say g l a d e anymore?

gloss the glimmer reef really
	hammockSplay		over-
tures daub mineral-rinse gyre
				cumulous curdle
					drift
						harmonies
formulate in flour
	acculturate spray

					love is pertinent to confusion
					meticulous punctuation is an expensive luxury

the floorboards rose,
		       then swallowed

Heller Levinson is the originator of Hinge Theory.  His most recent books are Dialogics (Anvil Tongue Press, 2022), Lure, and jus' sayn' (Black Widow Press, 2022). His Query Caboodle and Shift Gristle are scheduled for a Spring 2023 release (also BWP). He lives in the Hudson Valley, NY.

Featured Art Photo Grass Drawing for Sherwood Anderson by Linda Lynch

Anachronism Holiday by Shanta Lee

An Anachronism’s Version of a Holiday

Despite the different routes I chose to go exploring alone, I am grateful to the invites that were extended yesterday by individuals who, like me, make their own meaning out of the marked holidays.

I know of so many others like us who are increasingly becoming more comfortable with revising or creating the things they need to create to exist with within and outside of time on their own terms. Funny story, I encountered others who were thieving a whole day to themselves and they asked me to give them a tour because they felt safer exploring the rest of the complex. I always wanted to be a tour guide for the abandoned.

From Shanta Lee’s Exhibition Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine showing at the Fleming Museum of Art from February 2022 – Spring 2023

May all of us anachronisms always have full spirit, heart and energy to navigate within and outside of time on our own terms.

Shanta Lee is a writer of poetry, creative nonfiction, journalism, a visual artist and public intellectual actively participating in the cultural discourse with work that has been widely featured. Her current multimedia exhibition, Dark Goddess: An Exploration of the Sacred Feminine, which features her short film, interviews, and photography, and other items is currently on view at University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art from now until Spring 2023. To learn more about her work, visit: Shantalee.com

Shanta Lee Books

Ego Death During the Lunar Eclipse with Chet Zar

The ugliest thing I’ve seen is a video of a dog being cooked alive and a picture of a cat being skinned alive. Both were on Facebook. I’ll never forgive whoever posted them. Dogs are my friends. The scarcest thing that has ever happened to me was my grandfather chasing us around a dark house wearing a caveman mask when we were little kids.

I enjoy muddy colors, the colors the Old Masters used. I just like the warmth and earthiness of them. I use whatever color seems appropriate to me based on what I know about color and how I want the paintings to look.

Art is magick. I don’t think it influences my artwork any differently now that I practice. It’s more like I am aware that it’s basically the same process.

What is Ego Death? The show started with a title, “Ego Death”, and then I built a show around that. The term is pretty misunderstood. In a nutshell It refers to temporarily losing your sense of identity, usually from psychedelics which is a legitimate mystical experience.

There are too many contemporary artists I like. You can look at the Dark Art Society podcast since the majority of the artists I have interviewed I am a fan of. The only new band I can think of that I like is Invasives.

Born on November 12th, 1967, in the harbor town of San Pedro, CA, Chet Zar’s interest in art began at an early age. His parents were always very supportive and never put any limits on his creativity. His entire childhood was spent drawing, sculpting and painting.

Zar’s interest in the darker side of art began in the earliest stages of his life. A natural fascination with all things strange fostered within himself a deep connection to horror movies and dark imagery. He could relate to the feelings of fear, anxiety and isolation that they conveyed. These are themes which had permeated most of his childhood drawings and paintings and are reflected in his work to this day.

The combined interest in horror films and art eventually culminated into a career as a special effects make up artist, designer and sculptor for the motion picture industry, designing and creating creatures and make up effects effects for such films as, “The Ring”, “Hellboy I & II”, “Planet of the Apes” and the critically acclaimed music videos for the art metal band Tool. Zar also embraced the digital side of special effects as well, utitlizing the computer to translate his dark vision with 3D animation for Tool’s live shows and subsequently releasing many of them on his own DVD of dark 3D animation, “Disturb the Normal”.

But the many years spent dealing with all of the politics and artistic compromises of the film industry left Zar feeling creatively stagnant. At the beginning of 2000 (at the suggestion of horror author Clive Barker), he decided to go back to his roots and focus on his own original works and try his hand at fine art, specifically painting in oils. The result has been a renewed sense of purpose, artistic freedom and a clarity of vision that is evident in his darkly surreal (and often darkly humorous) paintings.

His artistic influences include painter James Zar (stepfather and artistic mentor), Beksinski, H.R. Giger, Frank Frazetta, M.C. Escher, Bosch, John Singer Sargent and Norman Rockwell just to name a few.

“Chet’s art is beautiful & scary. His style has a modern twist crashing into a classical approach. I think Chet is a master painter on his way to making a great mark in our little world. Wanna do something smart with your money? Invest in a Chet Zar painting.” – Adam Jones (TOOL)

Chet Zar Store of Doom

Chet Zar Patreon