"wig'n'leather" - flondo, 2010
As a rule my inspiration comes from characters, not plots. I need to see my characters, know how they look, in great and sometimes intimate detail. I cannot write a character if I don’t have a picture to start from. Once an intriguing character is there, I will somehow weave a story around him; yes I wrote him, because men interest me far more than women. What can I say, ahem.
Now, intriguing men don’t exactly grow on trees, but they can be glimpsed here and there as you go through life. Sometimes it’s the usual suspects, actors, via movies or photos. Sometimes they are more or less literally the boys next door. I found muses in the most unexpected places, but I must admit that lately my inspiration orbit is more or less centred around the work of one particular photographer, I discovered by chance (?) last year.
Imagine Ms Wyvern one day, sleepily accessing her Flickr home page, discovering that a certain flondo had faved one of her flower pics. Imagine her making her way to this flondo’s (“What sort of name is that anyway?”) photostream, fully expecting a collection of garden pictures (because of the flower fave), and being blasted backwards (double tumble) out of her little innocent camping chair when flondo’s photos began to load. Flop, look at all those hot flowers! (no, I didn’t say flop)
Needless to say, flowers have nothing to do with this.
"Please, SIR?" - flondo, 2012
What I had entered was not a garden, but an inexhaustible, sophisticated, dreamy study on the beauty of man. It was masterful, raunchy, poetical, bizarre, baroque, elegant, unbounded and utterly, delightfully shameless.
I was in the middle of writing Black Carnival, and all of a sudden, I found myself wholly at home.
Flondo can take just about anything, and make it look sexy. Don’t ask me how. I don’t know, he just does. You think a muscular fellow wearing one fishnet stocking would look quaint? Think again. It looks damn hot. You think a rope of pearls has no business adorning a fuzzy male butt? You’d be surprised, really. It maybe that I am very weird. But if so, flondo’s weirdness matches my own, and that is good enough for me.
Then there is the question of light. Either light travels slower in Toronto (why is all the cool stuff happening in Canada anyway?), or flondo is doing something supernatural with it. Light in his photographs is tame and plays tricks. It grazes on a model’s skin, making its texture come alive. You can feel some of his photos in your fingertips. Flondo’s light makes dancing shadows on screens and picks hints and glimpses of bodies in the darkness, turning them into dreamlike bronze.
Some of his models are picture-perfect, some are rugged and “real”. They all look hot in his pictures. Maybe they all are really ΓΌber-sexy beasts, or maybe he has a talent for expressing their particular individual sexiness. I don’t know, it is all part of the great mystery of his art.
He knows his way into Photoshop as I know my way into my trousers (perhaps better, all things considered), so that fantasy and reality have no borders here. In his pictures you enter not an imaginary universe but a thousand imaginary universes. There is enough imagination here to fill a hundred common artists. You never know what he will come up with tomorrow, except that it will be surprising and beautiful.
"Elegance" - flondo, 2011
There is a haunting, “alive” quality in flondo’s photography, especially if you experience it en masse on his Flickr page; he has a knack for capturing something in his models’ eyes, and these eyes upon eyes upon eyes, dark, sultry, thoughtful, absorbed, sometimes smiling, sometimes intimidating, piercingly present or lost in reverie, they all seem to follow you around as you pass.
They watch you as you watch them and as soon as you turn to go, they whisper behind your back. You are always on the verge of catching their words, but never quite.
What are flondo’s men saying?
I do not know for sure, but I keep going back, weaving tales of my own in the dark mystery of their whispers.
"Mysterious" - flondo, 2012
You can see flondo's pictures here:
Or, if you don't have access to flickr's restricted pictures, you can see a sample here:
http://wix.com/flondo/frederick
ALL rights on all of the above pictures belong solely to flondo. Do not share, use, or reproduce without flondo's written consent. Apart from the lawyers, you'll deal with an angry me.
ALL rights on all of the above pictures belong solely to flondo. Do not share, use, or reproduce without flondo's written consent. Apart from the lawyers, you'll deal with an angry me.
Interesting pics, for sure...
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