Note: This post contains sex, nudity and lots of it. You’ve been warned!
erotic
adj. of or pertaining to passionate love; arousing or designed to arouse feelings of sexual desire; amorous; amatory.
rawerotics
n: a singular theory or science of love constructed without recourse to cultural convention.
So begins Colin Rhodes’ essay in the book “Raw Erotica,” featuring rare outsider and folk artworks from a dizzying variety of artists, backgrounds, perspectives and media. For the uninitiated, outsider artwork is a prickly genre, categorizing artists working outside the mainstream, disconnected to and sometimes fully unaware of the so-called art world. Some are living with developmental disabilities, others in geographical isolation; the one thing tying the many artists and visions in “Raw Erotica” together is a shared interest in the erotic.
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Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
As you’re hopefully starting to digest, rawerotica thrives off sexual energy, but isn’t always (or even often) aiming towards physical penetration. The book quotes “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness,” in which German judge Daniel Paul Schreber describes the unorthodox texture of his personal desire. “When I speak of my duty to cultivate voluptuousness, I never mean any sexual desires toward other human beings (females) least of all sexual intercourse, but that I have to imagine myself as a man and a woman in one person having sex with myself, or somehow have to achieve with myself a certain sexual excitement.”
This Valentine’s Day, instead of honoring the many romantic artworks out there in the ether, we’re going a more unorthodox route. We’re paying tribute to rawerotica in all its infinite permutations, be they weird, raunchy, nasty or sweet. Because sometimes, it’s not about the sex in your life — it’s about the sex in your fantasies, on your canvas, or wherever else your dirty mind desires. See more outsider erotica below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
