An Artist from the Past - Sex Stories

An Artist from the Past

... high rise condos took the place of many neighborhoods; and, the kids disappeared. This left empty schools. One forward-looking borough selectman was an art lover and convinced the city to turn one of the elementary schools into art studios—working studios that would be open to the public on weekends.

A competition was held and I got to be one of the selection jurors. (Oh, I forgot to mention: my partner had convinced me to invest in the gallery he worked in when it was near bankruptcy. So I was a 50% owner of an East Village gallery, located on the first floor of an old brownstone. Nothing much then. Later probably the second best gallery for up and coming international artists after Gogosian's.)

It was through this series of events that I met Jerry Roper, one of the first 16 artists-in-residence. I had interviewed him and liked him a lot. We hit it off the first time we met.

Jerry was a strange character. He was an Amherst graduate, but immediately after graduation had gone to live with a group of hippies on a farm in Vermont and lost the next several years of his life to drugs. He had been "liberated" by doting parents, cleaned up and begun to paint. Jerry was about 5-6, with dark, almost black hair, bushy eyebrows over bright, lively blue-almost-purple eyes, light skinned and thin, really thin.

I liked his early work—mostly photo-realism, a movement which was just about to leave the fickle New York commercial art scene—and really good. He was extremely ...

... talented and apparently a little haunted by his past. He had become a vegan, a teetotaler, a non-smoker and a health nut. He ran 10 miles each day (an activity that I began to join him on Saturdays and Sundays within a month), and, during the first months I knew him, he began to bulk up. I was partly responsible.

We met often and I usually brought him a bag of groceries. He always looked so hungry! At about this time, my art gallery partner found someone he liked more than me, and left the gallery and me with two days notice. Our four month "affair" was over. So now I owned half a gallery and had no one on the scene on a regular basis. So I redoubled my involvement and started helping with shows and receptions.

Usually when I would visit Jerry, he was painting with live models. He had fallen in love with and painted only the beautiful human form—women and men. So his models were typically posed nude in the studio when I would arrive. He would often keep painting for some time as I sat and watched. Over a few weeks, I began to realize that Jerry was obviously interested in the human form—but only insofar as it gave him the opportunity to engage in social commentary, specifically the dark side of casual sex and sex for hire. Two models became three, then four, then a group. Thrift shop purchases had added faux-Tiffany lamps, fur throws, Victorian furniture, old silver pots, large fake palms and similar items—creating the backdrop of the decadent "Beau Monde" vibe of his oils And ...