Essay On Nude Painting

One of the pertinent problems which artists face today in our society on nude painting is the negative impression associated with the painting of female nude figures. Some painting students consider female nude painting as immoral and pornographic. This may be due to their religious background, for instance some are Christians, Moslems, and Traditional believers. The study employed qualitative method of research with purposive sampling technique and simple random sampling.Interview and questionnaire were also used to collect the necessary data for the study. The study revealed that nudity in painting or figure painting was introduced by the colonial educators who came to teach art at Achimota College in the 1960s. The research discovered that nudity in painting is art but not pornography: because it is used as a study object by the students in the Department of Painting and Sculpture

Lynda (1998) affirm the fact that the nude can stimulate the observer (male) by citing an instance that a young man was infatuated with a statue (Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite) that he hid himself one night in the shrine and masturbated on the statue, leaving stain on its thigh – a testimony to the figure’s lifelike qualities and the cue for this particular fantasy of male arousal.
In another permutation of this fantasy of male arousal there is the case from sixteenth-century Italy, of Aretino, who so admired the exceptional realism of a painted nude Venus by Sansorino that he claimed ‘it will fill the thoughts of all who look at it with lust.’ Lynda also said that over two centuries later after the above instant, there was the example of the bibliophile Henry George Quin, who crept into the Uffizi in Florence when no one was there, in order to admire the Medici Venus and who confessed to having ‘fervently kissed several parts of her divine