The First Woman I Ever Saw Naked Was A Thunderstorm. Some Nights I Dream That I'm Cupping Her Face With My Hands. When I Wake Up, I'm Holding Rain Painting

Sometimes the title is bigger than the painting. The name is taken from an Eduardo C. Corral poem. I painted this to hang in a local (Baltimore) erotic art show but I wanted to avoid the trappings that typically attend the subject. I went with this pose because it pushes back against the plainness of vulgarity and instead uses the arch of her body to connote transit and passage. In a way, it's a nod to the transformative power of the erotic experience. Unable to work from a live model, I used as a source image a thumbnail from an online medical journal discussing scoliosis.