CORN NUDES

WOODCOCK on August 7, 2026

I’ve been thinking a lot about combining two themes I’ve been exploring: corn and nudes.

Along the way, I’ve been collecting thoughts, phrases, images and ideas about where that combination might lead. This is a live document. It may eventually grow to include more complete ideas for individual pieces, but for now it’s a place to dump all the little nuggets I collect before they fall out of my head and disappear forever.

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  • uncanny orderliness of the Midwest
  • The nude selfie is a body disciplined into an image.
  • The weeds in the ditch are more representative of what this place naturally is than the cornfield.
  • offensively benign.
  • Each becomes this tiny interruption in an otherwise absurdly controlled biological surface.
    • a grain elevator
    • a farmhouse
    • a water tower
    • a turbine
    • an interstate overpass
    • a utility pole
    • an abandoned silo
    • a billboard
    • a church steeple
    • a little copse of trees
    • a drainage ditch
    • a single volunteer plant
    • a deer standing at the edge
    • a highway sign
    • a motel sign
    • a truck stop sign
  • Piekets are rows of corn stencils
    • rows of kernels on top of row of plants
    • the gaps betwen pickets could reveal chaos of weeds.
    • each picket could have a different scale, colors, background color,
  • And corn itself doesn’t have to be the villain.
    • Corn didn’t do anything.
    • We did.
    • Poor stupid adorable corn.
  • CROP
    • top of plant that is cut off (corn)
    • cutting edges of an image (selfies)
    • same origin – crop the plant to get the product (corn), crop a photo to get the product (tits)
  • FIELD
    • manufactured reality
    • straight
    • distant
    • repetitive
    • orthogonal
    • vast
    • hard-edged
    • public
    • industrial
  • NUDE
    • crooked
    • close
    • awkward
    • foreshortened
    • intimate
    • fragmentary
    • soft
    • private
    • LOOK AT THIS BODY.
    • vs
    • LOOK AT WHAT THIS PERSON DECIDED TO SHOW YOU.
    • The missing information becomes as important as the visible information.
      • Face outside frame.
      • One breast.
      • Part of stomach.
      • Shoulder disappearing.
      • Bathroom mirror.
      • Bed sheet.
      • Doorway.
      • Flash reflection.
      • A hand holding clothing aside.
      • The strange distortion produced by a phone held too close.
      • Light blowing out part of the body.
      • Blackness swallowing another.
      • And that wonderful accidental geometry created because the photograph wasn’t composed as Art.
      • It was composed as communication.
  • Vertical seams/pickets could become:
    • corn rows
    • phone-screen divisions
    • agricultural property lines
    • body fragmentation
  • There’s also a vocabulary emerging here.
  • Not necessarily titles. Just words I’d put on your studio wall:
    • CROP
    • FIELD
    • YIELD
      • A field yields.
      • A body yields.
      • A photograph yields an image.
      • An investment yields a return.
      • A person yields control.
    • EXPOSURE
    • CULTIVATED
    • VOLUNTEER
    • SELECTED
    • HYBRID
    • FEED
    • FERTILE
    • DESIRABLE
    • PRODUCT
    • GRADE
    • CHOICE
    • FLESH
    • ACRE
    • BUSHEL
    • BODY
    • PROPERTY
    • BOUNDARY
    • CONTROL
  • looking at things long enough that the familiar becomes strange.
  • an adorable little ear of corn—the most harmless fucking thing imaginable—becomes the smiling mascot sitting on top of an enormous machine for turning land into product.
  • Both the corn and the nude are cultivated images.
  • unruly biological thing
  • The edge where bedroom becomes field could have the same razor-straight quality you noticed along Illinois roads.
    • nude, corn Hard edge
    • weeds invade the nude’s space.
    • the weeds are echoed in the crack between the corn pickets
  • Pin up is commodity, corn is commodity…unnatural, cultivated, manufactured
    • she holds corn, advertises corn, is corn
    • on top of weeds, over lapped, dropped on, displacing
    • Make her beautifully cultivated.
    • Pinup language.
    • Commercial photography.
    • Maybe even some of your Sailor-Jerry vocabulary creeping in.
    • Smooth skin. Lovely breast. Perfect curve.
    • And behind her:
      • ditch
      • collapsed grain elevator
      • rust
      • concrete
      • weeds
      • utility infrastructure
      • scrub trees
      • power lines
      • Corn.
      • Pinup.
      • Silo.
      • Weeds.
      • Angel.
      • Turbine.
      • Breast.
      • Grain elevator.
      • Banner.
      • Farmhouse.
      • Cloud.
      • Utility pole.
      • Heart.
      • Highway sign.
    • Now she’s functioning almost exactly like the perfect corn.
    • She’s the desirable product sitting in front of everything required to manufacture desirability.
  • LANDSCAPE
    • 48 × 36″ vertical
    • A woman’s torso is cropped so aggressively that it’s initially almost abstract.
    • Tiny grain elevator.
    • Tiny wind turbine.
    • Tiny farmhouse.
    • The scale relationship makes absolutely no physical sense.
    • Intimate body / enormous landscape.
    • The thing photographed from twelve inches away and the thing seen from twelve miles away occupy the same plane.
  • WOOD
    • vertical wood strips forming the panel.
    • Some stop.
    • Some extend.
    • Some are slightly misaligned.
    • Corn rows cross them.
    • Body crosses them.
    • Wild vegetation appears in the seams.
    • Maybe certain passages remain bare wood.
    • The object itself begins exhibiting:
      • cultivation / interruption / repair / boundary / fragmentation.
    • toward the less precious painting language without artificially “painting looser.”
  • BREASTS
    • Biological.
    • Sexual.
    • Nutritional.
    • Commercialized.
    • Private.
    • Publicly regulated.
    • Desired.
    • Embarrassing.
    • Motherly.
    • Pornographic.
    • Completely ordinary anatomy.
    • exploitation?! They are sexual images!
      • The woman who sends someone a titty pic knows she’s creating a sexual image.
      • The recipient knows it.
      • The little charge created by that exchange is part of the subject
      • Sanitizing that would actually disrespect the phenomenon
    • interested in
      • sexual agency
      • desirability
      • presentation
      • cropping
      • transaction
      • commodification
      • the construction of an image,
      • rather than simply saying I enjoy looking at naked women, therefore I painted some.
        • Corn doesn’t excuse the nudity.
        • Corn complicates it.
        • And the nudity complicates the corn.
  • That’s the double-good-idea thing
  • avoid art school surrealism, clear environmental activism, ham handed narratives, just superimposing imagery and letting people figure it out. Keep distinct. Crisp distinction. Not blending and melting.
  • Tit pic selfie with an ear of corn in hand instead of phone.

Every grain elevator is painted as though it’s the steeple of a cathedral devoted to industrial agriculture.

CONSTRUCTION

  • Instead of layering, have the different picket cutouts meet with a clean edge like a puzzle
  • pickets can be held with a think panel behind glued and tacked on
  • imagery on panel bleeds through
  • Precision isn’t the problem.
  • Predetermination might be.

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Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Blue Boy: A Promising Pop Art Perspective

WOODCOCK on June 29, 2014

2014 • 46.75″ x 17.5″
acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets

(After the portrait of Jonathan Buttall by Thomas Gainsborough)

I loved the way the paintings and sculptures of the boy in the blue suit and the girl in the pink dress had a pop culture name of “Blue Boy” and “Pinkie.” We all remember seeing them in the beds and baths of our friends’ mothers, but none of us remember them having any impression other than an un-articulated feeling about their mothers’ bad taste. Later, when I found out everyone had similar experiences, it was great fun. I always wonder though…who among the people I meet today are the children of such women, or do they themselves have representations of these long dead children in their master bedrooms?

Wikipedia says:

The Blue Boy (c. 1770) is a full-length portrait in oil by Thomas Gainsborough, now in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.[1] Perhaps Gainsborough’s most famous work, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall (1752–1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, although this has never been proven. It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait: the youth in his 17th-century apparel is regarded as Gainsborough’s homage to Anthony van Dyck, and in particular is very close to Van Dyck’s portrait of Charles II as a boy.

PInkie and Blue Boy

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Pinkie: Relativist Pop Art Paining by Moe Profane

Pinkie: A Powerful Pop Art Portrayal Of A Historical Piece

WOODCOCK on June 29, 2014

2014 • 46.75″ x 17.5″
acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets

(After the portrait of Sarah Barrett Moulton by Thomas Lawrence)

I loved the way the paintings and sculptures of the boy in the blue suit and the girl in the pink dress had a pop culture name of “Blue Boy” and “Pinkie.” Growing up, I remember seeing them in the sleeping quarters and powder rooms of women of a certain age, but none of us remember them having any impression other than an un-articulated feeling about those women’s poor taste. Later, when I found out everyone had similar experiences, it was great fun discovering just how famous these images were. I always wonder though…who among the people I meet today are the children of such women, or do they themselves have representations of these long dead children in their master bedrooms?

Wikipedia says:

Pinkie is the traditional title for a portrait of 1794 by Thomas Lawrence in the permanent collection of the Huntington Library at San Marino, California where it hangs opposite The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough. The title now given it by the museum is Sarah Barrett Moulton: Pinkie.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Hair Sweaters and Highballs - Primavera: Relativist Pop Art Paintings by Moe Profane

Hair Sweaters and Highballs (Primavera): A Promising Sign of Spring

WOODCOCK on October 20, 2013

2013 • 48″ x 18″
acrylic, spray paint, fabric on panel

Throughout art history, seasonal themes have evoked not only death and resurrection and pagan imagery of classical antiquity that have continued to be a part of our seasonal holidays today. I this version, I have added some personal associations born of a neighbor who welcomed spring weather with a bare hairy torso, wandering the sidewalks with a highball in his hand.

Subjective associations are highlighted as well by the rubber spring symbols at his feet.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

The Emperor Is Speaking In Tongues: Relativist Pop Art Painting by Moe Profane

The Emperor is Speaking in Tongues: Easy Bullshit Recognition

WOODCOCK on October 19, 2013

2013 • 48″ x 18″
acrylic, spray paint, fabric on panel

This piece equates the pretentiousness, hypocrisy, collective denial, and hollow ostentatiousness satirized in the Hans Christian Andersen’s “Emperor’s New Clothes” with the phenomena of “speaking in tongues” in Christian churches. Like the townsfolk in the tale, believers play along with the pretense not wanting to appear unfit for their positions or stupid.

Wikipedia offered some insight into the satire of the classic story, saying it:

…quite clearly rehearses four contemporary controversies: the institution of a meritocratic civil service, the valuation of labor, the expansion of democratic power, and the appraisal of art.

Folk and fairy tale researcher Maria Tatar points out that Robbins indicates the swindling weavers are simply insisting that “the value of their labor be recognized apart from its material embodiment”, and notes that Robbins considers the ability of some in the tale to see the invisible cloth as “a successful enchantment”.

This could be a satire of modern art and consumerism in general. We all tend to suspend disbelief when we begin to accept the artificial worth of objects that have no intrinsic value…much like we have to be taught to appreciate the power of symbolic meaning in general or any specific religious doctrine.

The story and this piece represent a situation where “no one believes, but everyone believes that everyone else believes.”

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Cigars and Sexual Awakening: Relativist Pop Art Painting by Moe Profane

Cigars and Sexual Awakening: Shrewd Puberty Metaphor

WOODCOCK on February 21, 2013

2013 • 28″ x 38″
acrylic, spray paint on used fence pickets

Wikipedia told me:

Red Riding Hood has also been seen as a parable of sexual maturity. In this interpretation, the red cloak symbolizes the blood of menstruation,[27] braving the “dark forest” of womanhood…the wolf threatens the girl’s virginity. The anthropomorphic wolf symbolizes a man, who could be a lover, seducer or sexual predator.

Now all of this talk is rather Freudian, but we all know Freud said that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”…probably because he liked to smoke them. Now if the wolf is dragging the girl into womanhood and the woodsman is reaping the benefits, then they both have an interest in her “taking up smoking.”

A few people have recognized the composition of this piece as being a cigar box. Leaving the wood behind the figures unpainted highlights the sign-like quality.

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Diminished Castration of a Slave: Relativist Pop Art Painting by Moe Profane

Diminished Castration of a Slave: Fascinating Metaphor for Circumcision

WOODCOCK on October 18, 2012

2012 • 48″ x 18″
acrylic, spray paint on recycled fence pickets

From dear ol’ Wikipedia

Circumcision is arguably the world’s oldest planned surgical procedure, hypothesized to be over 15,000 years old, well pre-dating recorded history. There is no firm consensus as to how it came to be practiced worldwide. Peter Charles Remondino suggested that it began as a diminishment of full castration of a captured enemy: castration certainly would have been fatal, while some form of circumcision would permanently mark the defeated, yet leave him alive to serve as a slave.

So we see, the slave mentality of blindly mutilating your son’s sex organ because of some ancient religious dogma, is indeed, still, the diminished castration or marking of a slave.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Your Dick Is Showing: Relativist Pop Art Painting by Moe Profane

Your Dick is Showing: Revealing Ignorance

WOODCOCK on March 16, 2012

2011     •     48″ x 18″
acrylic, spray paint, fabric on panel

How is it that patriotic American zealots who get upset at burning flags WEAR so many flags themselves?

The United States Flag Code establishes advisory rules for display and care of the flag of the United States. It is Chapter 1 of Title 4 of the United States Code (4 U.S.C. § 1 et seq). This is a U.S. federal law, but there is no penalty for failure to comply with it. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that punitive enforcement would conflict with the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. – Wikipedia

United States Code:

TITLE 4 — FLAG AND SEAL, SEAT OF GOVERNMENT, AND THE STATES
CHAPTER 1 — THE FLAG

section 8 respect for the flag, paragraph (d) The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery. It should never be festooned, drawn back, nor up, in folds, but always allowed to fall free.

(f) The flag should never be used as a covering for a ceiling.

(i) The flag should never be used for advertising purposes in any manner whatsoever. It should not be embroidered on such articles as cushions or handkerchiefs and the like, printed or otherwise impressed on paper napkins or boxes or anything that is designed for temporary use and discard. Advertising signs should not be fastened to a staff or halyard from which the flag is flown.

So let it be noted…Literally wrapping yourself in flag isn’t necessarily a good thing. It is actually disrespectful…and if you do it, your dick might be showing.

Keep digging, WOODCOCK 🪏

Brother Ass in a Hairshirt: Relativist Pop Art Painting by Moe Profane

Brother Ass in a Hairshirt: A Self Deprivation Sensation

WOODCOCK on March 16, 2012

2011     •     48″ x 18″
acrylic, spray paint, fabric on panel

Here I explore the notion of spending this one life, denying your very nature and hating the very biology the very biology that makes us human. It highlights the approach St. Francis took to earthly pleasures:

St. Francis called the body ‘brother ass’. He kept this brother ass under perfect discipline and control. Sometimes he kept this brother ass without food and water and denied it some special food that it liked very much.

So why should one festoon their “brother ass” in a hairshirt?

A cilice was originally a garment or undergarment made of coarse cloth or animal hair (a hairshirt) worn close to the skin. It was used in some religious traditions to induce discomfort or pain as a sign of repentance and atonement.

The sole purpose of this self deprivation and torture was to fight one’s true humanity…that as any other organism with natural and purposeful instincts. I can only see it as unhealthy and sadly ridiculous for people to willingly participate into such misery.

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