I was wandering through The Mission recently checking out the vintage stores (which are now located next to some serious high-end boutiques in this increasingly trendy neighborhood). While in The Mission, there are a few places that I always stop at to see what’s up and what’s new and what isn’t new but is still worth seeing.

Those must-stop places include the murals of Clarion Alley, the displays over at Good Vibes, the curiosities at Paxton Gate, the nonsense at 826 Valencia (aka The Pirate Store) and the artwork hanging on the walls at the City Art Co-op. It was at this final stop of my meandering that I stumbled upon an artist with sexy works that I immediately fell in love with.

The artist is Richard Dodds. His bio says that he moved here in 1997 (via New York / LA / New Orleans) and has worked for The Bay Area Reporter while developing a second career as an artist. The art that I discovered over at City Art is his “Neo-Retro Beefcake” art. This takes the ideal of the beefcake man and brings it in to the new millennium. It’s absolutely eye-catching.

Beefcake is, of course, the term used for the male sex symbol who is equivalent to the female “cheesecake” model. We’re living in a time when burlesque is making a serious comeback and it’s easy to find women who are interested in pin-up poses, retro housewife ideals and the teasing flirtation of the 1950’s. In such an era, it’s refreshing to see that we still have room for the beefcake who came alive during the same era as these cheesecake girls.

The beefcake is a guy whose body reeks of physical prowess. He’s the bodybuilder, the weight lifter, the strong swimmer. And something about most beefcake photos reeks of homosexuality … these guys look like the kind of tough guys that are rippling their muscles in the gym because they want to end up with someone in the steam room. It’s pure raw male energy condensed down to its human form. And it’s beautiful.

And Richard Dodds captures that concept perfectly in his artwork. It’s sexy in the way that burlesque is sexy … more suggestive than exposed, more erotic than pornographic. Dodds captures the male form in a way that the viewer can appreciate and then adds to it through a combination of digital imagery, found images and other media. The impact is one that visually takes you back to the 1950’s but then somehow manages to reinforce that you’re still in the twenty first century. It’s like it brings innocence forward sixty years into now.

Note: There are no images of Dodds’ work on this blog post because everything he has on his site is copyrighted but I definitely think you should go look at what he’s done. My personal favorite is this one of a man outside the Cliff House.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 7:57 am and is filed under Art, People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.