Infant Naturale 002

A few years before I drew this larger scale drawing on stretched Canson paper in 1995, Madonna (the entertainer: love her or hate her!), published a modest book that was 128 pages long. The tome weighted in at (it seemed to me) at about six to seven kilograms, and had luck would have it, my local Canberra School of Art Library had a beautiful copy of it on their yellow varnished MDF standard “New Books” shelf, in 1995. It was covered in a PET Mylar bag, had a one pound US aluminium front cover and was spiral ringbound. If ever there was a statement that alternative sexuality and lifestyle had come of age, it was this!

I remember hoisting it up into my arms, thinking that it might have weighed as much as my blonde haired University girlfriend. Girlfriend? What’s that? I thought, oh yes, she’s the woman who makes love to me, who calls me “sweetheart”, who I want to spend the rest of my life with. However, something deep within me told me that this “wasn’t to be!” to quote the latest music hit by WetWetWet. In reality, all I was looking for was acceptance. As I opened the book and looked through the pages, I thought of the Art Theory Course I had recently enrolled in: Pornography! Every time I saw a sexually charged photo of a dark haired man in leather in the book, showing off his pert naked derrière in black leather codpiece, I thought of the paintings of Frida Khalo, her fractured torso like a Francis Picabia madmosellé personage, if you could think of a such a character painting a self portrait (remember them?) Every time I saw a bare breasted woman, nipples like chocolate bullets, cat of nine tails in hand, wearing a jet corset and rhinestone studded three-quarter cowgirl boots, I thought a lithograph by “the Little Cripple”, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and one of his dancing girls, kicking up her heels, not caring if it was her pale French underwear or a glimpse of almost equally pale bottom cheek she was showing, such was her focus on her job at hand...

Which brings us, how exactly, I hear you ask, to my drawing of two horses and a flower?

Well, you see, in my mind, I had traipsed through the streets of Paddington in Sydney in the rain in blue, aqua and black bodypaint, sprinkled with with a fine dusting of rainbow glitter, and wiggled my freckled bottom during Mardi Gras in 2002 (dressed as a fish swimming around a Centurion’s Galley). I was only gawked upon by an obese leather-bear, who clapped madly in the crowd from the footpath. I had made eyes with bright and svelte muscled Sydney-siders in white hot-shorts, only to be sneered at and dismissed with a snigger. But, here I was inspired to create, in an arcane fusion of Hengst and Hrosa, of Sire and Dam, their forms constructed as if by the hand of a talented Australian University trained sculptor (you see I had a wonderful pettite Ginger female friend, a platonic acquaintance, who wired and hewed into Styrofoam in the sculpture department there); forms as if enclosed by welded steel rods: a kind of monochromatic Picasso-Braque embodiment of two Horses. They stand like Russian Realist neddies, divested of all pretence, where some limbs are truncated, to please the thrust of their three dimensional bodies, a strength in physicality only matched by their spiritual growth. They actually stand, hovering over a magnolia, an image stolen (how very Postmodern) from the front cover of a Madonna “best of” magnetic tape album that I owned.

What better way to draw the viewers attention to this spiritual / physical dialectic, than a excerpt of a list of all the muscles of the equine body in the far left panel, and a corresponding excerpt of a list of all the bones from the Horse body on the far left panel?

I loved this drawing too much to sell it, so I gave it to my parents and they still own it. However my love of drawing Horses and their wonderful spirituality had commenced...

bluethumb.com.au/patrick-hromas