REBEL EROTICA

The Song of Self

Helen Beard loves sex.

“Sex is a fundamental; it’s something everyone gets up to,” she says, surrounded by her work—a painted orgy of yellow phalluses, pink labia and purple breasts. On display in her studio on the semi-industrial outskirts of Brighton, England, Beard’s paintings float between the realms of abstraction and figuration. It can take a minute to identify the large-scale curves, folds and orifices, especially in a world where humans are becoming accustomed to digesting visual culture on minuscule screens. But spend enough time with Beard’s work—at one of her rare London exhibitions or on Instagram (@helenbeardart)— and you’ll find a depiction of sex that, unlike the sanitized and chauvinistic embraces so common in traditional figurative art, insists on an equal distribution of pleasure.

“I like the power it gives the female form,” the 47-year-old artist says of her approach. “It’s not hiding behind anything. When you see it that big, you can’t avoid that it’s a vagina.”

• • •

Beard started using pornography as source material long before it became ubiquitous.

“I’m after that explosion, so I put colors together that will resonate and cause friction, like the feelings you get from the act of sex itself.”

“I used to go and buy top-shelf magazines,” she says. “I would travel Europe to get the more hardcore ones. But then the internet arrived.” Building a collection of porn thus began as a necessity—“You can’t just ask your friends to send pictures of them having sex”—but she has always taken care to avoid sexual imagery defined by unrealistic depictions of the female body. “So often it’s skinny women and muscly men,” she says. “I want a rounded view of the world, with lots of different people in it.”

That impulse is abundantly clear in The Song of Self, a new work created exclusively for PLAYBOY. Here, female affirmation is front and center. A green band suggests folds of stomach flesh, while the figure’s breasts appear realistically pendulous. “She’s natural, slouchy and pleasuring herself,” Beard explains. “It’s about body positivity. Women have sexual needs and can get pleasure that doesn’t have to come from penetrative sex. Quite often, in porn particularly, it’s all about men’s gratification.”

It’s the antithesis of the airbrushed, unattainable bodies that still dominate the media—and that, admittedly, have appeared on countless pages of this magazine. Yes, it would be careless not to recognize PLAYBOY’s contribution to the skewed male gaze on pleasure, and Beard is happy to discuss the tensions that might arise from this collaboration.

“I was a bit worried when I first got the call, because I am a feminist. I didn’t know if it was the right standpoint to be coming from,” she says. “I garnered a lot of opinions and ultimately determined that it’s great that PLAYBOY is reaching out to female writers and artists. It would be foolish to say no when women are finally getting their say. If you want to change public opinion, you need to do it within the realm of a lot of different audiences.”

• • •

Creating confrontational and widely viewed work wasn’t always Beard’s goal. For years, the Birmingham-born artist painted explicit images of humans pleasuring one another as a sidebar to her day job as a stylist and art director in the film industry. The notion that anyone other than her close friends or family would see her work was unfathomable—until Damien Hirst came along.

In 2016, when rail strikes brought London-bound commuter trains to a standstill, Beard’s husband, who worked as Hirst’s creative director, was forced to set up shop in his wife’s studio. During a Snapchat exchange with his boss concerning Halloween preparations, he sent a photo of his costume. Hirst was enamored of the Technicolor canvases in the background.

The notorious Young British Artist and entrepreneur had to have Beard’s Blue Valentine, an ostensibly abstract piece that camouflages a phallus penetrating an orifice. From there, Hirst pushed Beard to produce a series of larger paintings to be displayed at his Newport Street Gallery in South London as part of the 2018 True Colours group exhibition. Understandably, it was all a little daunting.

“I had a bit of a wobble the night before the opening. I e-mailed Damien and said, ‘I don’t know if I want anyone to ever see these paintings. I just want to stay in Brighton, quietly painting them on my own!’ But he said, ‘Don’t worry, everyone is going to love them.’ ”

Hirst’s prediction proved true. Since the exhibit’s opening, Beard has been inundated with requests for her work, including several commissions from Philip Niarchos, one of the world’s most influential collectors. The abrupt rise in demand has created stress, but Beard sees it as an opportunity to keep shining a light on underrepresented bodies. Although she began her art career painting heterosexual couples, informed by her own experiences, Beard has expanded her perspective to queer intimacy, inspired by the sexual fluidity embraced by younger generations, including her teenage children and their friends.

“I love that the world is going that way,” she says. “I’m diversifying to include all kinds of sex. It’s really important to portray everything.”

• • •

The vibrant and inclusive sexuality of Beard’s pieces is mirrored in the intuitive playfulness of her process. Although her canvases are full of solid planes of color, the brushwork, fine yet rigid, adds a texture that mimics the ripples of the body. Originally she was seduced by the flat finish of acrylic paint—thanks in part to her heroes Michael Craig-Martin and Patrick Caulfield—but she hit her stride with oils. “It does feel much more intimate,” she says, “because it’s like the fingers stroking the skin.”

During her 15-year career in film, Beard absorbed how cinematographers frame their shots. Intuition, as opposed to color theory, began to guide her palette selection.

“I have read the theory, but I try not to be dictated by it,” she says. “I’m after that explosion, so I put colors together that will resonate and cause friction, like the feelings you get from the act of sex itself.”

The artist is also keen to point out that though she references source material, her forms are embellished and reimagined. She swaps familiar, voyeuristic cinematic tropes for more intimate ones that compel the viewer to be an involved sexual player. Sometimes ideas come from unlikely places: Recent scientific discoveries concerning the size and shape of the clitoris inspired a group of paintings reminiscent of Henri Matisse’s “cut-outs.” Her 2017 piece Beastie Boy, which features a phallus decorated in what appears to be zebra print, is a work of striking serendipity: “I had been working for years on this painting, but something was missing,” she says. “At some point I was listening to the radio and they announced that Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys had died. I absolutely love them and I was so sad, so I suddenly thought, He’s a beastie boy! I’m going to give him a zebra cock! That was my divine inspiration.”

She goes on to mention that the years-long process behind Beastie Boy is nothing compared with the decades-long gestation of a piece she conceived as a teenager living in London. She was moved to acquire approximately 3,000 dildos from a Chinese manufacturer after seeing sex toys in the West End. “I just thought they were so nail-like,” she explains. “I wanted to make a bed of nails, but I never got around to doing it. I’ve had them stored in my loft, knowing I’d make a sculpture from them eventually. And now it is finally happening.”

• • •

Helen Beard is an art-world curveball. She is never in danger of over-conceptualizing her work (obfuscation is an anxious badge of honor for many emerging artists), she has no gallery representation, and perhaps most significantly, she has achieved the rare feat of gaining recognition following a break from work to start a family.

Beard still seems slightly stunned by her success. “It’s not what women expect, because they always think their career might have to go on the back burner if they have children.”

The massive disparities in terms of acknowledgement, critical success and sale prices (women still fetch a fraction of the figures achieved by male artists at auction) mean that Beard’s triumph is the exception, not the rule. The reality remains that female artists still face disproportionate challenges if they decide to have children—particularly if they elect, or need, to take time away from their practice. Beard recalls spending years contemplating how she would re-enter a world so fixated on the next young and trendy creator. “I felt like they might actually be making work that was the same as mine, but the difference was that no one would ever see me,” she says. “It could have easily stayed that way. Women need to be talking about these experiences, but it’s so hard to come back. Too often these voices aren’t being heard.”

It’s very much to the art world’s benefit that Beard, like the big, brilliant bodies in her paintings, isn’t hiding behind anything.

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