On Cadmus
Paul Cadmus painted a world that mid-century America mostly refused to acknowledge in public: sailors, bathers, and men who looked at each other openly, rendered with the same technical seriousness as any history painting. He wasn’t illustrating a hidden subculture. He was placing gay presence directly into the tradition of American figure painting, at a time when doing so was a provocation in itself.
My own work references Cadmus for that reason. When I build a composition around men in a shared social space — a locker room, a dance floor, a line of bodies under club light — I’m working from the same premise he did: that this presence belongs in the frame, painted with the same formal attention as any other subject, not set apart from it.
Cadmus made that presence visible in a country that preferred it stay out of view. I’m continuing that effort in my own way, in my own time, with my own version of the world he first put on canvas.
