Charles Wilson Sayer
I was born in 1948 in London. During my childhood, art was my main interest. In my late teens I attended St Martins school of art and in my twenties taught art in London for a few years before retiring from teaching to spend more time on my own work and other interests such as songwriting and the martial arts. After being awarded my black belt in karate I published a book on martial arts movements to music as a pioneering fitness system which arguably laid the foundations for' boxercise' and other martial aerobic formats to emerge from America in the eighties. I am also exploring the field of explicit erotic lyrics set to music and call this genre 'eroto-rock'. So far I have lost two female friends by playing them a couple of tracks!
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I chose to specialise in erotic art about a decade ago. I discovered that the art market, from the plethora of commercial galleries to the Turner Prize media circus, was living in denial refusing to recognise its own sexphobia. I noticed the nonsensical gap between the importance of sex in our lives and its under-representation in art. Despite this negativity I soldiered on, having a few one-man shows in galleries and exhibiting in an assortment of events in nightclubs and sex festivals such as 'Erotica' at Olympia.
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My suspicions about the art market were confirmed when I joined the Candid Arts Trust in Islington and after a year of wrangles with them over their constant pressure on me to submit less explicit work(explicit simply being stylised images of the vulva) I finally made my protest in the local newspaper and left the organisation.
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I define my art as 'conceptual erotica' because I want to remind people with my art that sex is not just about personal pleasure - its a high voltage discourse that interconnects with social issues, politics, philosophy and religion. It is probably one of the richest subjects conceptually speaking you can get. Arguably the biggest challenge to erotic art is to repair the damage done to it by monotheism and to reconnect it with spirituality."Better to Marry than to Burn" - I think St Paul got it a bit wrong. Despite what many people think we are still living in the shadow of the 'God will send you to hell for sex outside marriage' syndrome, and we need erotic art to heal us and to establish definitively the beauty of sex and the nude form.
There is strength in numbers. The Association of Erotic Artists certainly gives me fresh hope for the future.
I pursued publicity from the start as an alternative means of promoting my work. This however had its own downside. The media have their own agenda and always in my experience emphasize the flippant at the expense of the serious.The censorship restrictions are also fatuous and irritating. Nevertheless over the last decade I've been featured in the Independent newspaper and various sex mags such as Hustler and Nu .My work has been shown on TV - including Bend-Over; Men and Motors; and Eurotrash. The episode of Eurotrash was shown only once in Britain before it was banned due to complaints about my work. My crime was apparently to depict the human anus as a beautiful part of the human anatomy.
Email Charles darkmusicbusker@yahoo.co.uk
07984 844 375
Copyright Charles Wilson Sayer© 2004