Champion Of The Cheerleader: Joe Heaps Nelson

Without question, my favorite thing about football is the cheerleaders. I can’t watch more than fifteen minutes of a ball game on television, but I can watch cheerleaders jump and wiggle and form human pyramids for hours. The energy is infectious, the enthusiasm is amusing, and the acrobatics involved in most of the aerial maneuvers are nothing short of stunning. There’s a wholesome, fresh-scrubbed goodness attached to the average American’s marvel of and lust for cheerleaders. We don’t feel perverse for being entranced by them. Or maybe we should. The question is out there, frequently asked yet rarely explored.

Thus, it’s no small wonder why my favorite New York City artist is Joe Heaps Nelson.

Let me try to analyze his work after the jump.

I know little more about art than I do about football, but here’s my take on his style:

Nelson’s approach has a flatness that borders on cartoonish at times, which affords the viewer a detached position to his subject. Certain subject aspects (faces, body parts, etc) initially suggest that he doesn’t know how to harness a sense of realism, but further exposure soon reveals that he leaves these features deliberately distorted, or even unfinished, which subconsciously lends a sense of the creepy. His sensitivity to light and finding the stillness in motion is tremendous. Frozen cheerleaders hang in space, fixed in moments of triumph and sheer pep. He is able to inspire the wanton lust of the voyeur while simultaneously capturing the unspoiled innocence of the nubile young girls, leaving us with a sense of, for lack of a better way to express it, relaxed unease. It’s non-confrontational but leaves you subject to your own criteria. It’s a nifty trick.

Click here for my perennial favorite from his extensive body of work.

He also likes painting other stuff, like woolly mammoths, and bulldogs. (I bet we could commission a portrait of Porter quite easily, Joel.)