Work byLauralee Benjamin

I grew up in a “naked house” — my mom never wore clothes and encouraged me not to. So naturally I completely rejected that once I formed my own identity and was not into casual nudity until adulthood. As a kid there was an uncomfortable amount of attention paid to my weight and body so it was impossible to feel casual about it. As a sex-obsessed teenager, my brain wasn’t able to separate nudity from sex at all. When I really leaned into art as a full-time thing, my work naturally became 90% casual nudity, probably from my longtime obsession with women’s bodies and maturing as a person. Becoming more neutral about my own body helped.

So this wasn’t a conscious decision, it’s just something that sort of clicked one day. I’d always been mostly a portrait artist because it was reliable money. But about 9 years ago I started dating my now-wife and it was a really intense time (we were toxic!). We were on and off constantly for 2 years, and I would spend the off times in a deep depression: Tindering, watching porn, and obsessing over her.

I started being interested in the facial expressions people make in porn and how if I pause the frame, it’s like a photo — it’s giving you so much of a story. While also navigating this unhealthy, lust-filled new relationship, I just had all these emotions and transferring them to these women’s faces and then to paper just felt natural. They were getting me through this weird time. Porn has provided me with so much inspiration that I made an unofficial commitment to keep using it even though I’m no longer in that dark place. I’ve trained myself to find so many underlying emotions to pull from two people fucking on camera for money lol.

Almost exclusively found. These days I will occasionally take a reference photo of myself or my wife if there’s something I really need to see in order to illustrate, but for the most part I mostly work with porn, aside from my portrait clients. I’m terrible with working from memory, so I always need a reference.

People in my life sometimes send me nudes, to be helpful and nice, but I’m not very interested in posed photos and selfies. The intrigue with porn is that it feels like I’m capturing something unintentional that happened in a split second and removing all context.

I’m so glad you asked, thank you for noticing! When I first started using porn references I was really naive to how white, thin, and cis mainstream porn is. Like that’s an obvious conclusion now but at the time I was watching what was easily available and not digging deeper. It gets boring really fast when you’re watching porn every day — I had to branch out to new sites, start paying for porn, etc.

Honestly, I don’t have a non-selfish reason for the size and gender representation in my work, I just draw what interests me and there’s so little to find interesting about the status quo. When I come across artists that draw thin, male gaze-y women only, it’s boring and I tune out immediately.

I have a dedication to a very small palette, which are pretty much just my personal favorite colors — pink, purple, light blue, teal, neon yellow. Pink is the major one. I want to paint and draw in pink exclusively for the next few months, actually. No particular reason, it’s just my favorite color. My whole thing is inverting and juxtaposing, so the colors help with that. A close-up of someone being choked and drooling can be quirky and endearing if the person is teal and the drool is pink. I’ll tend to use realistic skin tones when the subject matter is really serious or heavy to me, like some pieces I’ve done specifically related to anti-Blackness.

I really try to remove the sexual element from the overtly sexual reference photos I’m using because otherwise I feel like I’m making porn. Which obviously I don’t dislike, but it’s not what I’m trying to make.

I’m sad, or angry, or energized and I’m using these body parts as a medium to express that. Even when it’s a couple engaged in sex, I’m interested in and trying to highlight the emotions their bodies evoke, but not the sex itself. It’s still unexpected to me when someone finds my work sexually arousing.