Art byFelipe Chavez

I relate my nudity with my fragility, my art, and my humanity. Though most would consider the freedom from clothes satisfying, for myself, the freedom is at times overwhelming. I think it’s because I’ve allowed my nudity to not only be a crucial element of my art, but it’s evolved to become a dependent companion to my own self-discovery. And when you reveal so much of “you,” you tend to break and fear to continue exposing.

The term “casual nudity” may be a way to normalize being nude, but in no way does the phrase justify its power. When I look back at my naked body, I can understand more of who I am, as though the person I was when I was nude was more honest than the person I am now.

I like to say that what I create reflects everything I know of myself and everything I don’t. And it’s taken me a while to acknowledge that. For a long time, I wasn’t sure why I painted myself. At first I thought it was because I couldn’t have a formal art education — having to grow independently, I relied on my own body as a tool to study form. But it wasn’t until three years ago that I uncovered so much more. I realized that how I saw and used my body, and the way I questioned my artistic purpose and existence, was what made me an artist.

And for me, to be able to call myself an artist, I need to involve every part of me to make true authentic pieces of art.

This is relatively recent — the last couple of years. When I went back to painting self-portraits, after doing many abstract pieces, I began to see the boys in the paintings as separate people. Sure, they were depictions of my thoughts and feelings, but they lived in a story different to mine, and as these narratives enveloped, I focused on their relationship with each other. As a viewer, when you look at the boys with their eyes covered, you almost feel an intruder in their space — they’re completely unaware of who is watching. Or by covering their mouth, I’ve chosen to silence them.

I find it fascinating that I can control those I paint, yet those people are still me. So though strange, it’s a very beautiful idea to think about.

Soon after I started painting the geometric lines behind the bodies, the natural progression was to add further detail and build more accurate and different backgrounds to help build the narrative. I wanted the boys to always feel as though they were inside a sanctuary, spacious with endless rooms to walk around and feel safe and nurtured. The classic architecture appeared when I wanted some of those rooms to almost resemble a labyrinth within a dream — and I say almost because I still wanted them to feel grounded and present.

The flowers entered the scene differently. With these endless hallways and entrances to other rooms that I had painted in the background, I kept questioning this world and wondered what an empty room would look like, how I could emote the same hollowness in my nude paintings without the presence of a physical man. So I chose to grow flowers in these rooms, and picture how they would look if left alone in a building meant for only men. Sometimes I paint the flowers and boys together and watch how they interact.

That’s correct. And I’ve always said that the process is equally as important as the outcome because half of what you see in my paintings are a captured moment of that process. The intention behind each artwork develops when I take the pictures — I don’t tend to know exactly why I choose each pose until I’m painting and can deconstruct what was going through my head at the time.

I take the pictures alone, me and my tripod, sometimes involving specific objects to be part of the scene too. I’d say I’ve collected hundreds of pictures of me in different poses and in different rooms throughout the years — hopefully all these images will be revealed in a book of some sort, showing the initial photographs next to the final paintings. That will be interesting!

Being an artist to me is a lot more than symbolic depictions of emotions, concepts, composition. It’s seeing the world differently.

From a young age going through so many family and financial problems, hiding my queerness in Colombia, then coming to the UK to be so alone and having to find a job as opposed to studying art, was all very challenging. I found comfort in solitude and art, being nude for myself and painting staring back at those photographs. Though now some of those early challenges have changed, they did not shape me — but it’s the way I handled it through my art which made me into the artist I am now.

Being an artist and being able to look so introspectively at yourself makes you see the entire world differently, searching for those spaces and moments where you’re away from troubles — a safe place to question and explore yourself.

Answering these questions has been very enlightening, so I want to thank Phil Miner for making me think. Why I choose to do art and specific choices in composition tend to be subconscious decisions that are hard to put into words. It’s as difficult as explaining why I’m real and why I exist.