BRENT RAY FRASER: ARTSEXUAL
CAUTION: NSFW
Over the course of our two years in existence, we at CineDump have strived to bring you not just the latest in film reviews and entertainment news, but interviews with fascinating individuals who may not normally come across the average media junkie’s radar. To that end we’ve spoken to body mod artists, identical twin horror filmmakers, purveyors of necrophiliac puppet docudramas and Pokémon hunting porn stars. Today, we take a further step into the spiral for a look at a very unique artist—a man who defies not simply the conventions of his craft, but whose very lifestyle is so rarefied that an entirely new term has had to be coined in order to classify him.
Ladies and gentlemen of CineDump, meet Brent Ray Fraser: Artsexual.
“It’s an artform-slash-movement. Artsexual. Because of the things I do with my art,” Fraser explains to me from his studio, an abandoned grain silo that he’s converted not just into a place to paint and sculpt but something of a social-science laboratory, a place where he conducts experiments in redefining the boundaries of art, sexuality, and, indeed, culture.
Which is a very complex way of saying Brent Ray Fraser makes art with his penis.
“I have been painting with my penis for over ten years, maybe eleven or twelve years,” Fraser tells me. His voice is smooth and casual, a commanding baritone that adds a level of academic severity to whatever he says. The effect is comforting; in contrast to whatever preconceptions one might develop upon hearing “penis painting bodybuilder,” Fraser is convivial, thoughtful, and approachable. If ever the artsexual movement takes off, it could ask for no better spokesman-slash-poster child.
“I have been making art since I was three years old, painting with a brush since I was three years old, and it’s just something that came very natural to me. Painting with a brush, that is. And I mean, it’s a long story, how I got into actually doing it, but in order to… How does one learn to paint with his penis? This is the question here.”
It turns out the answer is: a lot of hard work (No pun intended—a phrase which quickly became my mantra during my time with Fraser, who found himself cracking up at my numerous faux pas). For Fraser is no creepy uncle or weirdo in your apartment building, no artistic dilettante who claims his member as his tool for purposes of avoiding a rather odd conviction. No—he’s the real deal, a university educated artist (he graduated from Emily Carr in 2009) who’s laid aside the concept of using tools to render his creations and turned his very body itself into the instrument through which he expresses himself. “There’s more to it than people think,” Fraser tells me. “There’s a type of paint that you use. Specific pigments. Certain colors will actually irritate the skin and, moreso, the brand that you choose. You’re painting with skin that’s a lot thinner than the rest of your body, right? It absorbs everything on it, which can be dangerous, so you have to know a lot about your materials, your surface. The texture of the surface is very important. Because if you paint on something that is a raw canvas, you’re gonna get raw. Rubbing your skin on the surface is like rubbing your finger on sandpaper. So, you need to properly prepare your canvas with special primers, and glazes, and things like that so that it glides on. And then there’s the amount of paint that you have, and whether you’re performing in front of a live audience.”
That “live audience” remark may be puzzling to the uninitiated, but it’s just another component of what separates the artist from the artsexual. While watching someone paint may sound only slightly more exciting than watching paint dry, Fraser has turned portraiture into a performance art, stripping nude and going to work before live studio audiences in mediums as varied as France’s Got Talent to Canadian documentaries. “You get into speed penis painting which is stuff you can do in under two minutes, where you can paint a portrait. And then just coming up with techniques so you can paint with an erect penis and you can paint with a flaccid penis, and both of them have two different techniques. And present two different styles to the audience.”
So, then, we have the how, but what about the why? Art schools churn our boats of graduates every year; and while their success may vary from city mural artists to selling caricatures down at the wharf, few can boast that they’ve become international masters of the cock and the canvas.
“My art takes me down roads I never thought would be possible,” Fraser tells me, growing reflective. “Especially growing up pretty shy.” In fact, it was that very shyness which, paradoxically, led down Fraser’s road to artsexuality. It’s here that a deeper, emotionally complex motivation emerges, beyond the superficially juvenile spectacle of a grown man painting with his genitals, where Fraser’s performance art diverges from pseudo-intellectual shenanigans and reveals a true statement: When Fraser engages with his art, we are seeing an epic rendering of man’s battle with his own shyness and insecurity. “I grew up super, super, super shy. I still consider myself pretty shy, but it’s something I deal with in my art, and it’s something that I often struggle with onstage,” Fraser says. He’s attempted to tackle the idea in other mediums as well, though always with his trademark flair; and it’s here that he refers me to a rather unique statue in his collection.
“It’s a self portrait that kinda captures me—well, definitely captures me...” You can guess what it is. “It was my first sculpture. But it was just meant to be a sculpture. It was meant to sit on a bookstand, not to be used as a toy, but more a representation of me making my way into performance art. It’s tied off. Are you familiar with tying off? To keep the blood in there. That was a technique that was taught to me years ago when I got into becoming a male stripper. I had no idea that these guys were tying themselves off. Those things don’t feel very good, they’re actually the opposite of arousal, they’re pain. And I wanted to capture that pain in a sculptural form. That statue, over the years, I’ve tried to sell it but no one will buy it… so I started to investigate silicone molds and how to transform—how to make installation art, is what I called it, taking the sculpture to the next level and installing it in people’s bodies. Taking art and showcasing it inside of someone’s body, which really fascinates me as an artist, but, most people call those “dildos”. They don’t consider a dildo a work of art. That kinda interested me as an artist to transform something that would be seen as just a sculpture and take it further and have people start inserting it, and using it to arouse themselves. So what I’m doing is taking something that is meant to represent the arousal of an artist, the pain of an artist, and taking the pain of an artist and transforming it back into sexual arousal for the viewer or the collector. That kinda stuff blows my mind, you know?”
Speaking of mind blowing—and that’s another pun, isn’t it?—what about the image that greets me on Fraser’s homepage, a Miami Vice-esque pink-and-green neon scene of him firing what appears to be a phallic squirt gun? When I first took this assignment and began my research, I did, after all, find myself telling a friend that I was talking to a guy who made erotic squirt guns—I’ve got to pay that story off later with good details.
“That cock gun there, you know, I don’t sell too many of ‘em,” Fraser tells me, though the apparatus is strictly for show—there’s no squirting to be found. “Honestly I’ve probably only sold one, thinking about it, because people can’t get past—It’s ironic, they can’t get past the price point I put on that thing. It used to be more but I’d like to start selling them. $200 for a dildo is—No one pays $200 for a dildo because they can get one for $40 from a Chinese factory, you know? Mass produced. But these cock guns are handmade by the artist. I made the mold myself. I do everything myself. Which is why it takes so long. Over 24 hours to make. So they’re not, realistically, a way for me to make money with how much effort I put into making one of them. So they just sit on the website for people to look at and see them. I like the idea of making them into squirt guns, though [laughs].” What about the jet emanating from it in the photo?
“That’s my magical powers!” he laughs.
This is all but an aspect of Fraser’s artsexuality, though. After all, one could simply write him off as a rather unique type of artist if all he was doing was painting with his penis—it’s unusual, but certainly nothing too groundbreaking. To grasp the full gravity of Fraser’s lifestyle, we must go back to the beginning—where lifestyle merged with art and artsexuality itself was born. That’s a tale that begins in an unlikely setting for most origin stories, but one which feels perfectly natural for Fraser’s saga: a strip club.
“Stripping came into my life because I needed a project to counteract shyness. I wanted to be a famous artist, and you can’t be shy and be famous. So I was like, ‘Brent, you have to get rid of this shyness. You’ve had it your whole life. You can’t get up in front of audiences without getting beet-red and sweaty and uncomfortable.’ This was something I’d dealt with my entire life. Until I came up with this project in my fourth year of school, a proect to counteract introversion. I thought, what would be the opposite of what you are now? Exposing yourself would be the opposite of hiding yourself. All right? So, I thought, where can you do that? Where can you completely expose yourself? Male stripping.” So it was that Fraser entered the world of male stripping—a world unusually fraught with peril for an artist whose work and lifestyle veer so closely together.
“I had an art show in Vancouver at White Ocean Gallery and they allowed me to do a surprise strip show. I had given myself a year to make friends with strippers, learn how to do it, and put it all together. I couldn’t dance, I couldn’t do any of that stuff, so I just slowly taught myself the routine. And I got hooked after that. And I started doing strip shows and became very busy doing private parties and things like that. It was taking away from my studio time. I was making big money stripping but not making art. I wasn’t considering stripping art back then. So I retired, I quit. I retired from my stripper world and was painting. But then it kept pulling me back in…”
Like a conflicted gangster in a Mafia epic, Fraser found that, every time he thought he was out, the allure of the stage proved to be too strong, and he found himself torn between two lifestyles running at opposing ends on the same spectrum.
“I had grown accustomed to the attention you get from being a stripper and being onstage, and the energy of the audience. So I came back. And the second time I retired from stripping was because of the tying off. My doctor told me not to tie my penis off. [laughs] DON’T TIE YOUR PENIS OFF! There’s nerve endings. I kept it on for an hour one time, and I lost sensation for a week. I couldn’t feel anything. So I retired the second time. And that retirement lasted for a little bit and it pulled me back in. But this time I figured out how to do a tie off! And again was very, very busy at it. Travelling quite a bit, ladies nights, working in gay bars, doing all sorts of things. But not painting. So the fourth time I retired was strictly to focus on painting.”
Then, inspiration: “I had an idea where I could paint onstage during my Ladies’ Nights, during this performances, and that’s what kind of fused those things together.”
Artsexuality was born. And while it may, at present, be an orientation of one, that hasn’t stopped Fraser from exploring its’ limits, meaning, and scope.
“A mutual friend suggested that I do my stage shows inside my studio on a webcam, on a porn chat site. Which are HUGE business these days… my friend said, ‘You need to go on here and do your art. There’s nobody doing what you do. I think you can make some money at it.’ It really expanded my art and my perception of art… everything kinda made sense for me. So I’ve been webcamming for almost five years now. I’ve got a pretty large following, I think, like, 20,000 people follow me. And it’s a porn site, so it’s not something I can generally invite, like, mainstream people to kinda watch, you know? I just paint naked, I’m not on there doing anything too crazy, uh—uh, actually, I take that back. I do a lot of crazy things on there. I can get away with just painting naked, but I take things to the next level, obviously. I kinda skyrocketed in that industry and people were starting to classify me as a porn star. Even though it’s just me and my art. I’m invited to work with companies in the porn industry now, with virtual reality goggles, and, you know, those new goggles that they’ve got out there for 3D. I’m an avatar in a world that’s one of the largest virtual worlds in our world, which blows my mind. People can lead a second life in this world, and buy things, different avatars, and it’s all with these goggles. So I’ve been kinda working with that industry as well. But at the same time I’m trying to distance myself from it, as an artist, because I don’t want to be known as a porn star. I’m sure my parents would appreciate that, as well. [laughs]”
It's strangely comforting to know that Fraser is out there. If variety is the spice of life, he surely ranks up somewhere near cayenne, and there’s a weird reassurance that in a social landscape consistently jaded by the mundane, repetitive, and thoughtless, someone like Fraser is making this a more interesting world to call home. What does the future hold
“I was thinking of creating a curriculum for aspiring penis painters. There’s a lot of things that go into it and I know them quite well. It’s kinda become second nature to me now,” Fraser says. As to his own future endeavors? “I’ve got a new site that I’ve been building, it’s an art site, and I’ve been making my own chatroom on there. Having my own chat site, it distances me from the porn industry, which will hopefully help me become more recognized in the art world, not as a porn star, but as, uh… an ART porn star, I guess. [laughs] So, yeah… and that’s that!”
Any last thoughts?
“I love the idea of a squirt gun!”
Bill Haydon