The Art of Harry Bush

[Guest Les]

He was one of the best gay illustrators to come down the pike...sort of our own Norman Rockwell with a more interesting subject...LOL :7

http://www.subdimension.com/userpages/culture/les3/index/harrybushart1.JPG

[Guest fukamarine]

Your use of the past tense makes me ask:

 

Did he die? Is this an obit?

 

fukamarine

[Rick Munroe]

>He was one of the best gay illustrators to come down the pike...

 

Is coming down a pike the same thing as shooting down a throat? Anyway...I prefer The Hun's illustrations (they're nastier):

 

http://www.hunart.com/web13.jpg http://www.hunart.com/web4.jpg

http://www.hunart.com/web7.jpg http://www.hunart.com/web9.jpg

http://www.hunart.com/web10.jpg http://www.hunart.com/web11.jpg

[+ Lucky]

These are great pictures which definitely qualify as art! Thanks, guys!

[Guest Les]

Great ones Rick! :7

I too enjoy depictions of nasty, brutal sex but prefer the potential bottom to appear more vulnerable.

http://www.dikdigler.hpg.ig.com.br/desenho/images/0403_jpg.jpg

[Guest Les]

Alas fukamarine...Harry died some time ago.

 

 

HARRY BUSH

 

 

The work of Harry Bush was well-known to most American gay men from the 1960's through the 1980's. His depictions of All-American young men blended the proportions of classical ideals with the casualness of California beach culture. Using an amazing economy of gesture and an elegance of line, he created erotic images that were simultaneously tantalizingly realistic and impossibly perfect.

 

His life — from his California youth through his military service and ending with his death from emphysema in 1994 — was painfully at odds with the free spirit and easy beauty of the world his drawings depict. The magazines that would purchase his drawings edited and cropped them thoughtlessly, using them over and over without paying the royalties that had been agreed upon. Bush ended his life a deeply bitter and resentful recluse.

 

I was recently shocked to learn that most of my acquaintances — even those active in the world of male erotica — had never heard of Harry Bush (his real name, by the way) and had never seen his work. And so I've put together this collection of images to provide the merest glimpse into the world that he created.

 

There are several self-explanatory groupings below. Four drawings deal with an imagined induction process; several are from his "I was the nerd who ..." fantasy series, others depict all-too-human "gods". (My personal favorite is that of the boy sitting on a construction platform, a "For Hire" sign between his legs). Bush's favored male types were the relaxed, almost slack-jawed California beach-men, particularly surfers. He often used live models and, like Tom of Finland, raised them in his drawings from ordinary beautiful men to a state of timeless perfection — while retaining all the essential elements that made them real and believably of-this-time.

 

When you look at these drawings, remember that this is a pathetically inadequate sampling of Harry Bush's work. And remember that these computer-monitor reproductions fail — by a long shot — to capture the finesse and expressiveness of his lines, his modelling, his shading.

 

And then sometime hoist a drink — or shoot a load — to the memory of Harry Bush, his genius and his accomplishment.

 

A link:

http://www.treasureislandmedia.com/tothe/point.htm

[Guest Armand Tesla]

The Harry Bush art is beautiful, and the other stuff is just plain jizz inducing and sexy!

 

As a teen I remember being very entranced by the erotic art that appeared in all male mags; sometimes the cartoons and drawings were hotter than the live models. Beautiful thing, the imagination.;-)