"To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone."

Sir Kenneth Clarke; The Nude 1956.

I have adopted Clarke’s differentiation of nude and naked for this print. Some art critics are so desperate to extol the academic and moral virtues of artists that they seem to want to remove from them any vestige of humanity – the aspect of personality that makes them, artists. The notion that Lautrec should be obsessed with the academic aspects of the female form is quite absurd – he simply liked looking at sexy women, while the paintings of Egon Schiele speak for themselves. Similarly Velasquez’s painting of the Rokeby Venus is such a celebration of women that it was said to have shocked the apparently prudish court of Phillip IV of Spain. Less so perhaps than when it was slashed by the suffragette Mary Richardson in 1914. In this print I have over laid an A to Z of texts of some of the artists named, with their juxtaposed famous paintings. Some are fairly academic while others are blatantly erotic. I leave the viewers, to decide which is which depending on their perspectives or proclivities.

50 Shades of Grey was the result of desaturating the colour from the original image of Nude not Naked and posterising it by 12 levels thus producing approximately 50 shades of grey. It is a signed limited edition comprising 5 digital prints on canvas each finished with a silk-screen printed satin protection varnish, and an Ultra Violet pearlised glaze on the text.