Chen Tuby - Gay Pastel Drawings

Chen Tuby is an Israeli gay artist living in Berlin. Pan art gallery is proud to present some of his most recent work. Find more in his website

About the artist in his words:

"I was born color blind and grew up in a kibbutz near the Gaza border. Gay, the youngest of four brothers and living in a war zone, I was longing to spread my wings and fly to freedom. The scorn of society and the lack of societal understanding of my differences being color blind and gay in this closed community created my early will to break with my entire existence and rebuild and reform it, creating something new out of nothing. I describe my work process as breaking and repairing from the first stain on the drawing surface through the restoration of the next layer that arises and repairs its previous state to the completeness of the drawing.

Already as a child, I was attracted to art.  I participated in art classes and played music. But when I grew up and moved out of the community, I decided to study drawing properly and found an artist who would teach me the basics of drawing. She taught me the power of being a painter despite my inability to work by the rules (color mixing rules, for example). With experience I realized it would be ideal  for me to draw in monochrome, to draw the light instead of the shadows. I define the colors as three primary color families: blue, yellow and red with each family  ranging from dark to light. 

The inspiration for my latest work came from my night job in a gay men’s club.  I sought emotions in such an unemotional environment and found out to my surprise that not everything is black or white. My work is a series of sensual paintings made with soft pastel on black paper. I use this technique to practice how to work with the play of  light and shadow and to understand how to be a color blind painter. I choose to uncover my models but not to reveal their gaze in order to expose or hide their body language and to sharpen the opposites of softness and hardness."