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Christopher Leach (born 1972) is a transvestite English artist whose erotic work is, at times, reminiscent in style of that of Aubrey Beardsley’s art nouveau sketches.<ref name=leach> christopherleach.co.uk</ref> and in theme to that of H. R. Giger. Many of his pen-and-ink drawings are black and white, but his work includes color sketches and some oil paintings as well. He describes his early output as including “softer, more decorative“ work of “tasteful Art Nouveau Style drawings" and "tasteful nudity," and his later work as "fetish and transgendered erotic art” and as "hermaphroditic art" that features his “alter-ego Tgirl, Jojo”.<ref name=leach/>

He mixes symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism with a decorative Art Nouveau style, having learned to mix media in creating the collages that characterized his early years’ production.<ref name=leach/>

Inspirations and influences

Leach identifies these artists as inspirations for and influences upon his own work:<ref name=incubus> incubuschoice.com</ref>

L.S. Lowry

Marcel Gromaire

Raymond Bertrand

Otto Muller

George Grosz

Ernst Fuchs.

Description

His works include Teasel Tina and the Toy Boy, Black Forest Clinic, Where Do Dreamy Traffic Wardens Go When It Gets Wet, and Fetish Tram. They are crowded with bizarre figures--men, women, and transsexuals--who, partly or fully nude, engage in strange activities that often do not seem to have any relation to the works’ titles. When they do wear clothing, the garb often comprises odd costumes. A female figure central to Happy Valley, for example, wears a bonnet, a mask with antennae; a tall, spiked collar; a bustier of sorts, made of crisscrossed laces with cutouts to expose her breasts; black gloves that rise to the middle of her biceps; a garter belt; and fancy mesh stockings. Her left arm is around the shoulders of a smaller male figure who wears dark sunglasses and a brassiere, the left strap of which is looped around his left biceps, revealing a breast, and she paints upon his bare belly while his left hand hovers before his erect penis.

In Happy Valley, the mostly nude male transvestite whose belly is being painted by the lady in the mask, high spiked collar, bustier, gloves, and stockings has an erection. The glans looks like a glans, but it also resembles the cleft of a vagina.

Fleshbot.com has said of his work,"Definitely some of the strangest and more original erotic artwork we've seen in a while."<ref> fleshbot.com</ref>

Leach says that the images in his drawings "just unfold across the page like energetic surreal daydreams. . . ideas and images just weave themselves together as my libido and imagination does [sic] the thinking for me".<ref name=incubus/>

In An End to Waiting, several transvestites wearing nothing but stockings are penetrated per anum by the tendrils of a flowering vine. In Jyllinge Girl, a flower grows from the small of a back, just below a pair of legs wearing stockings. Bent at the knees, the legs combine to become the forearm of a woman holding a wand. The back above the buttocks forms the woman’s left shoulder, which is extended straight out from her body. In Cello Woman a woman’s upper body forms a cello. She has no legs, but is supported by a pair of bare feet that grow at the bottoms of her severely truncated thighs. Reading from a sheet of music on a stand before her, she plays the strings of herself, which emerge from her pubic region, run along the center of her midsection, and merge with the wooden neck of the instrument that rests upon her left shoulder. This image is repeated, with a variation, in If I Ruled, in which a masked, bare-breasted woman holds a cello that consists of a woman’s torso; she has neither arms, legs, nor head, and her neck, greatly elongated and wooden, is the neck of the instrument.

In Boy Venus 550, a pair of buttocks, a lower back clad in a corset, and a pair of upper thighs wearing stockings form the hills of the background landscape. In Joys of Gardening, a woman’s body merges with the front of a building, the large front window of which is centered just below her bare breasts and, below it, the door is centered in her belly. Legless, her belly and groin, which appear to be made of brick or stone, fuse with the ground below. In the same picture, a woman’s well-lashed buttocks give rise to the back of a corset that resembles the back of a chair or, perhaps, a trellis.

Jojo

On his Web site, Leach discusses his muse, the Tgirl whom he calls Jojo. He met her, he says, in a 1919 Pablo Picasso painting, Italian Peasants, that he studied as he tried to learn how to draw faces. His alter-ego as a transvestite, Jojo is a stand-in, as it were, for the women whom Leach lacks in his life as he maintains a bachelor’s existence between periodic girlfriends “who through no real fault of their own have brought mostly heartache and loneliness”.<ref name=leach/>

Leach admits that he is partial to young women; girls captivate him because “for me a slim teenage girl in particular can be just perfection itself".<ref name=leach/> He describes women in biomechanical terms much like the images of Giger, referring to them as “A beautiful living machine with moist lips and bright eyes”.<ref name=leach/> All the men in his pictures, he says, are versions or images of himself:

: Sometimes I was an angel, sometimes I was a figure of fetish fun: I was even a hermaphrodite with an erect ejaculating penis moving amongst the excited women like a busy humming bird. At more serious times though I was just the artist or even a fully clothed slightly bewildered voyeur.<ref name=leach/>

However, he also adds that "The hope for my art is that by creating beautiful images it will not only help break down sexual barriers, I also convey something very personal for others and future generations to share".<ref name=incubus/>

Leach says that:

: Artistically I am an uninhibited erotic free spirit that has no sexual preferences as I am neither man nor woman. I don’t really understand it myself but I believe the male figures I create are hermaphrodite lesbian rather than gay or transsexual. But I must control my art to a degree as I leave out all the things that most disgust me like any form of real violence or abuse.<ref name=incubus/>

Critical appraisal

At the Firenze Biennale Internazionale Dell'Arte Contemporanea in 2003, art critic John T Spike said, of Leach’s 1994 drawing, A Taste of Honey:

: This is erotic art. Christopher Leach has great fun doing these drawings. He is stronger in the black and white than in the coloured work. He does erotic drawings a' la Beardsley. Technically fine, he provokes and challenges with these fetishes.<ref name=leach/>

Exhibitions

Leach’s art has been shown at the Cannock Art Gallery (1978) (Amsterdam); at The Gallerie Erotique 'D'Lammerberch (1991); at Annecy (France); at The Torture Garden (London); and at Southampton and has been published in six counties in the following publications:

Twilight (Berlin, Germany)

Rouge et Noir (Nantes, France).

Some Bizarre, (Stockton on Tees, UK)

Unleashed (Leeds, UK.)

Jade, Scarborough, UK)

Paramour (Cambridge MA/USA)

Bitches with Whips (Seattle, USA)

Redemption (Vancouver, Canada).

Fullsize (Rhinefelden), Switzerland).

References

See also

Shemale art