Okay. Still not over the penis thing, and apparently it’s got nothing to do with whether I’m getting laid or not.*

Actually, that doesn’t surprise me. As weird as this sounds, and as much derisive laughter as I deserve for uttering it, there’s something oddly non-sexual about these. They do not fill me with lust or anything like that. But because they’re penises, they’re kinda…iconic. For just a moment, I Have Your Complete Attention.** It’s eyegrabbing, and it’s funny, but I don’t think it’s really all that sexual, and a fair number of people commenting had a similar response.

Part of the reason I didn’t want to use the frog, however, was because as soon as you add something in there that people can identify with, it GETS sexual. They’re the frog, sitting on a penis, and dude, c’mon. That’s just…err…yeah.

Nobody identifies with the butterfly. The butterfly is pretty, but it’s not a PERSON.

My latest sketches are all penises with fish. Originally I had thought that the line was vertebrates, but I don’t find myself identifying with the fish in the sketches, so maybe it’s not about backbones. I just know that the fish are a kind of…decorative thing, like a butterfly…and the frog is a person. Is it about limbs? Lungs? Faces? (I suspect it’s faces–the profile of a fish is an alien thing, one flat eye and a grimacing fixed mouth, the face of a frog has two eyes and a smile.)

Non-sexual sexual imagery. Hey, if it worked for Georgia O’Keefe…

*Just trust me on this one.

**I don’t have anything useful to DO with it, but I do have your attention.