I often wonder what is the nature of beauty? Why is that some people have a deep need for beauty in their lives, and others don’t? Or to put it more simply, what is beauty? I really can’t answer that, except to speak for myself. For my entire life I have felt a deep draw towards beautiful things. I remember even as a child feeling the power of female beauty, the allure of loveliness, the power of love. When I finally became a young adult, I felt those things even more. As I grew into a man the force became even more and more powerful. No longer just an observer, as I was when an adolescent, I could now participate in the erotic pleasures of beauty with beautiful women. Once having tasted this elixir, I was addicted for life. And as I said in a previous post, what a sweet addiction it is.

There is so much ugliness in the world right now. Perhaps there has always been. There always will be. Still, amid all this ugliness, it is important to seek out the beautiful. I feel a need to write about beauty amid the ugliness of our times. For me, at the moment, this is pretty much physical beauty, not only the feminine, but the beauty found in art, nature, architecture. I would put music and literature in that category, but those a bit more abstract.

And yet for me there is also the spiritual nature of beauty. When I pray, I feel a peace and joy and comfort that is hard to describe. Perhaps this comes from a communion with God. There is a certain kind of beauty and pleasure in spiritual joy. For me the two are infinitely linked, beauty and God. If I believe in God, which I do, then I believe also that all beauty ultimately comes from God, that God created beauty and also gave us the capacity to appreciate and even enjoy beauty in all its various forms. This is why I like the Renaissance type of Catholicism: it recognized and celebrated the beauty of God’s creation, even the erotic nature of beauty.

For me the female body is a thing of beauty, a work of art crafted by the hand of God. For most men, nothing on this earth is as powerfully alluring as a beautiful woman. For me, only the power of divine joy and beauty is greater. And this is where I find a deep difference between porn and erotica. Porn tends to be cheaper and baser, lacking artistic merit, whereas erotica tends to be of a higher quality, possessing artistic merit, and of deeper meaning. I hope the photos I post on here are of the second quality. And as I have stated before, throughout history many artists have created works which at the time were criticized or censured as being pornographic, but later on were recognized as great works of artistic merit. I feel the same way about many well done female nudes. They capture the eroticism of life, but they do so in an artistic way. I came across a porn site recently called X-Art: http://x-art.com/  I find it one of the best sites out there doing explicit porn, or better yet, erotica. The girls are natural, the setting natural, the lighting and atmosphere delicate, yet charged and highly sexual. I am not sure if I would classify this as art, others might, but it is certainly one of the more beautiful depictions of explicit eroticism I have found.

And for me art and beauty and eroticism will always be intricately linked.