joanathegrey ASKED:

Where did you get inspiration?

Music, mostly — the worlds I found in Boys and Girls, Daydream Nation, or Dog Man Star drove me to photography in the first place. I’m still hoping to reach their heights someday — never mind the glory of Soundtracks for the Blind.

As for more direct, visual inspiration, if you dig through this Tumblr you’ll find plenty of people I found inspiring over the years. Here are some painters I love & I think you’ll love them too: Balthus, Smith, Modigliani, Nerdrum, Saville. And let’s not forget photographers, of course! Here’s today’s top 5: Newton, Bourdin, Moon, Ballen, Penn.

Love, Nikola

Ask me anything.

Balthus, Cathy Dressing “As to poetry, it enters Balthus’s painting in the form of a picture entitled Cathy Dressing, in which the young, desirable body of a woman asserts its dream-like authority over a painting as realistic as Courbet’s Studio. Imagine a painter’s model suddenly transformed, in real life, into a sphinx, and you will have some idea of the impression made by this painting. A technique from the time of David is placed at the service of a violent, modern  inspiration. And it is truly the inspiration of a unhealthy epoch, in which the artist who conspires with the real, exploits it only in order to crucify it better.” — Antonin Artaud More Balthus.
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Balthus, Cathy Dressing

“As to poetry, it enters Balthus’s painting in the form of a picture entitled Cathy Dressing, in which the young, desirable body of a woman asserts its dream-like authority over a painting as realistic as Courbet’s Studio. Imagine a painter’s model suddenly transformed, in real life, into a sphinx, and you will have some idea of the impression made by this painting. A technique from the time of David is placed at the service of a violent, modern  inspiration. And it is truly the inspiration of a unhealthy epoch, in which the artist who conspires with the real, exploits it only in order to crucify it better.”

— Antonin Artaud

More Balthus.

XXX

Men with erections, many of them cavorting with one another; paintings of children standing on their mothers’ laps and urinating; multiple depictions of mothers breast-feeding infants; scores of Oceanic wooden sculptures that depict male figures with enormous multiple penises; René Magritte’s painting showing only pudenda covered in a damp mat of dark pubic hair; François Boucher’s naked woman alone in bed rubbing her vulva on the bedsheets, and another holding a dog between her legs; Picasso’s woman with her anus directly at the center of the portrait; Papua New Guinean sculptures showing full-on vaginal penetration; multiple sculptures of figures in flagrant coitus in the Indian wing; Balthus’s young girl posed so that you can see her underpants, stained with red; Roman images of bestiality; a Greek vase made in the shape of a fully erect male member complete with curly pubic hair; a headdress effigy of a female with legs spread and vulva visible; Lorenzo Lotto’s painting of an ecstatic woman caressing her own breasts, squeezing flower petals between her legs, and being urinated on by a small child.

— Jerry Saltz, from Open Letter to the Republicans of the 111th Congress