BY JOEY NATHAN

For most artists, having a one-man show in your hometown would be a proud and momentous occasion. For artist Larry Hill, however, it was a time of protests and police officers.

“My first one-man show in my hometown of Boise, ID was closed down by the local authorities,” Larry says. “How well one’s art is received depends on who sees it, I guess.”

The residents of Boise must not have liked Larry’s erotic images of naked men in sexually explicit poses with other hot guys. That’s fine with him. It’s just part of his private goal to expand people’s views of erotic art and the male body.

“Art should stir some kind of emotion, evoking some type of response. I want people to walk away from my artwork feeling something -- whether they are offended or aroused doesn’t really matter,” Larry says.

Larry, now a resident of Seattle, WA, has always been drawing and painting, even from an early age. With a degree in art history, he has drawn everything from still life images to landscapes to portraits. After many years as a successful artist, Larry still felt uninspired and artistically unfulfilled.

“I had become like 90 percent of the artists I saw year after year, art fair after art fair, always painting the same subject matter,” Larry recalls. “I was just one in a thousand of artists -- some good, some bad, but all the same.”

He changed his art style to his current erotic form when he started spending time around naked men. A lot of naked men.

“One of my part time jobs was working in a gay bathhouse. All those men, cruising and posing, the definition of their muscles in the dim lighting,” he tells. “I saw this raw beauty of masculine sexuality. It was that raw erotic beauty that I wanted to capture. This is when I began focusing on male erotic art.

“I consider myself a gay erotic artist,” Larry continues. “Throughout history, artists have seen the male physique as one of the most inspiring and artistically perfect forms in nature. I try to represent the male form as idealistic, masculine and sexual without a lot of over exaggeration. As much as gay sex in the focus of my work, I try to portray that in a more idealistic way.”

Aside from capturing the beauty of buffed men sucking and fucking, Larry hopes to recapture the respect due to erotic artists. Erotic art has been around for thousands of years, and he points out that it has only been in the past few decades that it has become a dirty underground art form.

“That’s something that society should not be subject to,” he says. “I see erotic art as a visual allusion meant to stimulate the sensual senses, arousing within the viewer a sexual fantasy. In my art, I try to recreate that allusion. I would hope in some small way my artwork will help bring erotic art out in the open.”

You can see more of Larry’s work in places that won’t get shut down by the local authorities -- like the Tom of Finland Erotic Art Fair in Los Angeles this October, or the Seattle Erotic Art Fair next spring. You can always log on to www.larryhillart.com to support his revolution.