Paul Rosano painted by Sylvia Sleigh

Always strumming the mandolin.

A few days I did a post wanting to know more about the hairy nude guy in a painting.  Here is what I found out:

 Sylvia Sleigh (b.1916) moved to the United States from Wales in the 1960s. She is perhaps best known for her feminist parodies of iconic paintings which incorporate gender reversal in famous themes. Works that allude to well-known paintings by such masters as Giorgione, Titian and Manet—who all treated the theme of the reclining Venus—depict male rather than female nudes. Similarly, Sleigh replaced Ingres’s nude women in Turkish bath scenes with bathing men. She used these works to explore the question of values attached to the traditional representations of women and men, and to draw attention to the absence in Western art of erotic portraits of men. In her many portraits of Paul Rosano, a model she painted many times in the 1970s, Sleigh satirically juxtaposed the idealized stances traditionally given to gods or figure-heads with commonplace contemporary settings.

Perhaps he’s a lover of modernist furniture?

In a 2007 interview for Myartspace, Sylvia Sleigh was asked if gender equality issues in the mainstream art world, and the world in general, had changed for the better. Sleigh answered, "I do think things have improved for women in general; there are many more women in government, in law and corporate jobs, but it’s very difficult in the art world for women to find a gallery." One of her most well known paintings, A.I.R. Group Portrait (1977), depicts the members of a gallery (to which she herself belonged) that was founded to begin addressing this inequality.

 "My favorite is Paul Rosano, a man she

painted again and again. When I show Paul Rosano Reclining in my art history classes the students almost always audibly gasp.

\And why wouldn’t they? After weeks of seeing female nudes in the same reclined position, here we have Rosano laid out, full afro and all. His head is slightly tilted as he stares softly at the viewer. There’s something sweet about Paul Rosano and Sleigh’s depiction of him. I’ve searched for information on Rosano—who is he? Was he an artist? A musician? What’s his hair like today? But have turned up little besides theses images.

Paul Rosano, who are you? Maybe this is the crux of the condition of what Laura Mulvey famously called “to-be-looked-at-ness.” We’re not supposed to wonder about the

object of desire, we’re simply only to desire." -- Katie Geha

Here he stares impassively at the viewer. Was he getting tired posing on this pillow?

Paul Rosano is this your personal music blog?
If so, did you really think the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ album was one of the best albums of 2011?

He’s clearly a fan of denim.

Always reclining.

He appears twice in this painting.