For years, Portland artist Dan Gluibizzi has been harvesting images of nudes, exhibitionists and swingers from the blogging site Tumblr. He saves JPEGs, makes formal image groupings, arranges them in Photoshop, projects them and finally traces and paints them.
Where others see flesh, he sees line and form. When others reblog, he right-clicks and chooses "Save Image As."
“There has been an explosion of amateur exhibitionism. There must be 50 million unique Tumblr sites and I think 49 million of them must be of nudity!” jokes Gluibizzi.
He's a self-confessed Tumblr addict – he follows 600 Tumblrs about art, the figure, the nude, swingers and dangly (and not-so-dangly) bits. “When I connected with Tumblr in 2008 it was on. The images were the exact kind I was looking for – non-sexual, really positive and super playful images of all body types.” His favorite Tumblr sites are those on which users post their own pictures.
Gluibizzi is a nerd for art history and figurative painting. He graduated with a printmaking MFA in 1997 and has been a practicing artist ever since. Before Tumblr he was screen-grabbing, sifting through culture magazines and digging through found photos and antique postcards at bric-a-brac stores.
“There'd be tens of thousands of postcards that you could flip though. It's not exactly the amateur images that I try to work with today but it was the same experience of looking for that perfect image,” he says.
Gluibizzi’s reconstructed paintings of online NSFW imagery reflect back what most people already know: the internet is a haven for kinky activity. Yet the artwork almost separates nudity from sex, both in the images Gluibizzi chooses and in the way he paints them. Some paintings do skew towards the erotic, but that's almost a coincidence.
“On Tumblr, there aren’t just young and attractive people. In the nudist magazines of the '50s and '60s they eliminated all the middle-aged men and women. Tumblr has everything across the board – fat skinny, tall, short and goofy-looking,” he says.
Suspicions about Gluibizzi’s motivations crop up occasionally, but he’s open about what he does. He’s sensitive to artists’ rights and to professionals’ work getting mixed in with the rest, but he also knows the internet is a playground. His Tumblr dashboard often feeds unexpected pairings such as nudist beach photos next to a 19th-century etching or a fetish image next to a Courbet oil painting.
“They look exactly the same! It is really wonderful to see,” says Gluibizzi. “Matisse images find their way on to Tumblr a lot because they are very sexy images. They really work in that format.”
Gluibizzi even has his own Tumblr – Yet Happy Pair (NSFW) – that he claims “brings together themes of love, unrequited love, sexiness, voyeuristic tendencies, painting, photography and the body.” It's as close as one can get to a visualization of his tastes.
“In art school, 20 years ago, you had to go to the art library and spend long - but wonderful hours - going through the racks and finding the pictures and that is something that I think artists will always do, will need to do. But now with Tumblr ... It’s wide open,” he says.
Gluibizzi isn’t some loner recluse. Working out of a spare bedroom in a modest Portland condo, his most content times are the evenings when he and his wife have put their young daughter to bed and sit together in his studio. A silly movie (a shared guilty-pleasure) will play in the background for the umpteenth time and while his wife reads, he paints genitals.
For him, nudity is no biggy. His father was a painter and he was teased when classmates found out there were often nude models in the family home. But the upbringing has made clear the distinction between images of nudity and images of porn. Gluibizzi understands the waters that he explores sometimes yield some morally and legally questionable images, but he says he abhors them as much as the next person.
“I hate images where it looks like anyone is suffering,” says Gluibizzi before excepting images of male domination (“The men are super willing participants even if it looks like they are getting hurt”).
Private images that seem to be posted without the subject's consent, especially when the subject is underage, he also finds upsetting. And even though Gluibizzi "The Artist" benefits from the growing prevalence of sexual imagery, it is something Gluibizzi "The Father" worries about.
“I read a New York Times article about tough questions from your child, such as ‘Why does that lady like to get strangled?’ Those are tough questions to field,” he says. “And it's only two clicks away.”
The persistent nature of images on the internet also fascinates Gluibizzi as he projects out decades from now. On the internet, one mistake can last a lifetime – which may change the way we define "mistakes."
“Bill Clinton said that he didn't inhale. Everybody knows that Barack Obama did inhale,” says Gluibizzi “Will there be a president one day who has to explain his or her nude picture online? We’ll say, 'Well, that person is brilliant, they are totally competent and they know what they are doing, and er, we see their tits.’”
Comprised of nearly 80 million blogs and handling 16 billion pages views per month, Tumblr isn’t going anywhere in the near future, but if it did would Gluibizzi's art die?
“I'm always looking at photography, but painting and drawing is really what the end result is all about; making a handmade work of art in which people can see my touch,” says Gluibizzi. “If Tumblr was to disappear that would also be exciting. I’d take all the things I've been thinking about and working with and apply them in other ways. Tumblr isn't an end-all.”
Photo credit: Clayton Cotterell made the two portraits of Dan Gluibizzi and the studio shot and scanned works courtesy of the artist.
