BearoticEntertainment for Bears and the furry at heart.

Chris Komater Realigns Heaven, Nature And Furry Male Bodies

Written by NetBear on August 3, 2008 – 5:07 am -

The ability of an artist to combine the familiar with the not so familiar is one of the sneaky little techniques they use to enlightening us as an audience.

While you might initially just see bear porn stars above, in time you will notice they are not at all in poses you have seen them in before. Their bodies have formed new, almost classic images. This is new. This is tantalizing. This is artist Chris Komater.

As you will read below, Chris has a passion for the furry male image. So naturally he was inspired to incorporate it into his art projects. Chris has produced many, many works over the years. But we wanted to introduce you to some of his more bearish results. It will hopefully be just enough to give you an idea for where Chris is coming from and, with the aid of his own descriptions, what each piece tries to bring to us.

In one of his earlier works, Night Of The Hunter, Chris began featuring hairy models combined into full room presentations. As we meander along this hirsute path, I’ll let Chris do the talking.

“Night of the Hunter, translates my obsession with hairy men into an environment the viewer can enter. My passion for the hirsute is rendered as a quest for beauty and as a place to live: I the artist/hunter, and the hairy bear my subject/trophy.”

“Ideal City is inspired by the painting Ideal City by Piero della Francesca. Della Francesca painted an idealized urban scene — devoid of people, a harmony of classical architectural elements. Rather than mystical/rational space, I’m looking at male and female forms — abstracted and close up, fragmented into gesture, or taken apart and reassembled.”

“For the installation, Garden, I approached the gallery, and my subject — the large hairy male body — from the perspective of a garden designer, one who shapes nature into artifice. Working against an idea of masculinity expressed in grunts and clothed in plaid, the male bodies found in the installation are taken apart and rearranged as formal garden elements, contextualized in a landscape filled with flowers, blossoms, and the sounds of merry men.”

“For the past few years, I have been photographing the hairy male body very close-up, and then reassembling the images in large abstract arrays. I’ve been very interested in a segment of the gay community called the “bear community” that exalts the physical characteristics of bears — lots of body hair and big tummies. The movement presents an ideal of beauty quite outside of the mainstream. By exploring my own desire, I invite the viewer to share my fascination and to subvert with me, if only for a moment, received ideas of beauty.”

There is one particular collection from Chris that caught the Bearotic eye. Jack & Mack features some familiar faces, and bodies, but in poses that aren’t what we’ve seen in the past.

“JACK RADCLIFFE & MACK are the preeminent bear porn stars, considered icons in the bear community. I’ve introduced a different kind of artifice into images of them, photographing them in poses taken from Renaissance painting, bringing together two very different codes of physical expression, each of which heightens the experience of the body in its own fashion.”

As we usually do, we took the time to ask Chris some questions about his artwork. We’ll intersperse questions and answers with more Jack and Mack heavenly bodies.

Where do you get your inspiration for your artwork?

My inspiration comes directly from my sexual attraction to this particular type of body — the big and hairy kind — and a desire to explore and transform the sensual and sometimes frightening aspects of my intimate relation to it into something visual. I tend to get really close with my camera, as close as a lover. Sometimes I’ll put these close-up images together into abstract arrays, creating an experience that’s just about hair and skin, but frequently I’ll put them together into arrays that resemble flowers.

I think that outside of the bear community people aren’t used to looking at big hairy bellies and thinking, “now that’s something that I like to look at,” so I’ve chosen flowers — who doesn’t like looking at flowers? — to lure my viewer into an intimate and aesthetic encounter with my subject. Two pieces from my most recent project, “Garden,” for example, look like flowers, but are implicitly about an intimate encounter with my subject: “Sepals, Petals, Lip, and Pouch, ” named after the parts of an orchid, consists of two images of my lover’s spread knees, and two images of his up-ended furry butt; “Rosy-Fingered Dawn,” which looks like a rose, is comprised of four images of my fingers running through my lover’s furry chest. It’s a marriage of the innocuous and the profane.

I’ve also found inspiration in the work of artists from different times who have used the body in their work to different ends. Caravaggio and Giovanni Bellini were big influences on me early on, and for different reasons: Bellini’s bodies are of a different realm, heavenly, and Caravaggio’s are very much of this earth. I photographed bear pornstars Jack Radcliffe and Mack — other-worldly beings residing amongst us — in poses taken from their paintings. Since the bodies of these guys are so familiar, through the many pornographic images and videos of them in circulation, I wanted to re-position their bodies as sources of aesthetic pleasure.

Is it tough getting your models into the right frame of mind?

I’ve only worked with a few models, and most are my lovers or very good friends. The close-ups that I shoot are a direct extension of our love-making — a way of finding new meaning and joy in continued exploration. I have one model who’s a good friend, Jim, and he lets me hose him down or dunk him under bath bubbles, all with a jolly laugh. I couldn’t do this with a stranger. Working with these guys feels very much like a collaboration, so it’s always been very comfortable and easy. Except when I had Big Chrissy stand spread-eagled atop two ladders with hot lights burning his muff while I photographed his butt from beneath, I generally don’t demand too much of my models.

Jack and Mack are really the only professional models I’ve worked with, and they were amazing, a complete pleasure. Jack would get into position and hold it with such seriousness. Mack did exactly as I asked even though it meant twisting his body into positions that even he hadn’t gotten into before.

Do you find it distracting working when you have nude “bear gods” right in front of you?

Since most of my models are my lovers, our photo sessions are just about looking and being looked at, a visual experience that is pointed in a different direction from our love-making, so the interaction is almost meditative, with both of us intensely focused on our jobs.

Jack and Mack were a little distracting, though, I have to admit, as they were guys who’ve always resided in some far away Fantasy Land. Suddenly they were right there in front of me, sweating, talking to me, real people. I’d made love to them a million times each, in my fantasies, and there they were, naked and inches away from me, yet they remained just as untouchable, kept safely in the realm of fantasy — but a 3-D Imax equivalent of my fantasy. I did make a 12-image, 4 foot by 6 foot grid of Jack’s flaccid penis, though, my private pornography, based on the Salvador Dali sequence in Hitchcock’s “Spellbound.”

Where do you want to take your art? Or… where is your art taking you?

Thus far my art has provided a great opportunity for combining my need for physical intimacy with my need to communicate visually. Years ago, a curator came to my studio to look at this awful art I was making at the time, supposedly all about obsession, and he said, “Chris, there’s no obsession here. Show me your obsession.” It started me thinking about finding meaning in the things that I am really obsessed with, and big hairy guys are at the top of the list.

I’d love for people outside of our insular bear world to look at my work and think differently about this body, to maybe enjoy it on a visual level that approximates my physical enjoyment of it. I don’t know where my art will take me next, really, or if bears will be along for the ride. I do hope that my life and art will remain intertwined, and that whatever is around the corner will provide as much stimulation and inspiration as the bears have.

What’s next for you?

I’ve been working on a photo project based on the theme of the spider web. It consists of a series of single-image photographs of real spider webs, all blurry and weird and beautiful, and a multi-image grid of my SuperHairyModel Dean’s body hair, the images arranged to look like a giant spider web.

Spider webs are these amazing things, so delicate yet strong, catching rays of sunlight as well as the evening’s meal. My fascination with the bear is somewhat like the little male spider mounting his big furry female mate who may decide to eat her inseminator afterwards, but is going to give him this moment of sheer bliss, possibly his last. It’s about the possibilities of love and the tenuousness of life and pleasure, about trying to make art out of what’s in front of you, about light and how we see what we want to see, about finding something magical and provocative and sustaining in something as ordinary as the spider webs in my backyard, or Dean’s furry chest.

We’ve got a surprise for you. Chris finished his Spider Web project in time for this article going live. So you, dear Bearotic reader, get to see it first.

As we told you earlier, Chris has been a very prolific artist over the years. And there are many more of his works to explore. We couldn’t begin to represent him adequately in just one posting. To see more of Chris’ art collection visit his web site.

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