Offering 1: Water, a tentative resolve by Edward Ficklin

Title:	Offering 1: Water, a tentative resolve
Date Created:	2022
Copyright:	© Edward Ficklin
Genre:	Fantasy
Mediums:	Oils
Views:	150
Posted:	12/8/2022

Projects: Edward Ficklin (he/him), the maverick illustrator not afraid to say gay, is a self-taught painter, writer, publisher and sometimes technologist. He creates daring and exquisite queer fantasy art, publishes queer-centered sci-fi comix, and pontificates regularly on a range of topics in his Queer Quantum Dispatch newsletter.

Location: New York, NY

A passive male figure is not unheard of in Western art, but passive in the form of a willing offering of themselves is not so common. It's something I wanted to explore more in this work (and two more in the series). While the offering could have taken the form of something more mundane like a religious or political allegory, I wanted to instead go deeper. What if the offering is being made to something inhuman, otherworldly? Well then you have the subversive thrill of a male figure, usually associated with control and power, willingly giving in to, seeking union with larger elemental forces. There are three paintings in the series, each focused on a different element: water, earth, and metal. Each element evokes a very different environment and, more importantly, a different manifestation of the totality to which our golden beauties are about to merge with. The erotic need not, indeed should not, be limited merely to the human realm.