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Lili G - An Erotic Vision There are women's artists and artists who happen to be women. Lili G is an incredibly meticulous erotic artist who just happens to be a woman. Featured Recipe: Slow Comfortable Screw
Ingredients:
1 oz. Vodka
3/4 oz. Southern Comfort
3/4 oz. Sloe Gin
Fresh Orange Juice
Ice
Instructions:
Pour alcohol over ice cubes into a chilled highball glass. Stir and fill with orange juice.
Eroticalee 1 & 2 Websites by Lili G
 
Not long ago an erotic artist erupted on Blogspot.com. And I use the word “erupted” in all contexts of the word. Both of her sites,
EROTICALEE 1: Close Your Eyes and EROTICALEE
2: Open Your Imagination are hot. The first is a combination of writing and images while the second is images only. I was drawn to this woman because of the contradictions I saw in her writing, her life, her profile, and her art. I had to find out more about her.
On EROTICALEE 1: Close Your Eyes Lili G is chronicling her life as a sex worker. In addition to photos, the narratives give us two distinct voices. Lili left home after her mother’s suicide when she was 13 and went to work on the streets. In the stories she tells about her life working as a prostitute and pictures for us her life and the people she met there. Her voice is detached and matter-of-fact.
Lili says:”They are a present reflection of what I thought at the time but wasn’t able to voice. I didn’t have the words. Now I have the words but of course the “immediate” feeling is dulled. The dulled feeling gives me room to explore my child mind , to poke at the painful parts without hurting myself…. I can tell [the stories] in a matter-of-fact way because the child I tell of is gone. She became a woman who can look back and reflect. A woman who has forgiven and never laid blame.
”I think if I’m trying to tell anything it’s just that these people existed, and these people made me who I am, if it were not for each and every one of them, and so many more I’ve forgotten, I would not be me. I would like so much to tell of others I knew, non-sexual stories, but I don’t know that my readers would have patients to read them.”
Lili recognizes that sex sells. It always has and it always will. The stories are raw, brutal at times, but there is a truth to them that defies being labeled as porn. But there is another voice that emerges at EROTICALEE 1: Close Your Eyes. It is an emotional voice found in the poetry and writing that appears on some of the images.
Lili continues: “The poetry comes from emotional pain, and is written to heal old wounds. It’s written for, and to, my mother and sister. I write letters to them both, also. Very painful, but once written, very healing. Of course neither mother or sisters will ever read the letters.
”My mother can’t because she killed herself when I was 13, and my sister won’t because she’s lost to me. Being trapped in her world of drug addiction I haven’t heard from her for over ten years, but she’s always very close to me, though she keeps her distance. We are the only two alive who share the secrets of suicide.
”Suicide does not happen in a void, not planned in a vacuum. Sometimes I think the worse thing my mother did to her daughters was to leave them alive. That’s the pain reflected in the poetry. The child speaking in the poetry still cries for her mother, she never grew up and she’ll never forgive.”
One paragraph in “Cop #2 and Her Blindfold” particularly captured my attention. In the blog Lili writes:
”Once I was bold enough to ask of there was anything I could do for her to make her happy. ‘No, ‘ she said, ‘nothing, just promise me you’ll live and grow-up to be a woman of a kind that will not look back harshly on me for what I’ve done.’ I said nothing right away. No one had ever mentioned my growing up before. I’d never an opportunity to think I’d one day be a woman, or what kind of woman. I never thought much past the next job or the next time I’d eat. Mistaking my silence she dropped my hand and started the car, my signal to leave. I turned to her and said ‘I promise,’ before getting out and running away as fast as my enormous heels would carry my scrawny legs. Ran away from thoughts of tomorrow. Thoughts that took away my edge of survival.”
When I let Lili know that her comments intrigued me,
Lili responded: “I never thought I would grow up. No one had ever asked me ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I thought only of the moment. Living only for one day. In a letter to my sister I wrote ‘Tomorrow is forever to a child, and never is an eternal word.’ For a year I’d listened, night after night, as my mother came to me, waking me to tell of her plans for death. I never wanted tomorrow to come, because tomorrow she would die. But tomorrow did come, and with it came the ‘forever’ of death and the ‘never’ of another tomorrow. That’s how I thought of it then, and so I never thought of tomorrow, because tomorrow held death. Growing up meant so many little deaths. Confused thoughts, I know. A child’s thoughts.”
At one point in her blogs, Lili admits to the use of drugs to help her survive the pain of some of the scenes she performed with clients. She also says that workers make a conscious choice to either remain or leave the trade. I asked her in what other ways she worked to survive and if she felt at that time if she had a choice.
Lili replied: “I think I survived because I knew I didn’t have to stay. I did have a home to return to, but I didn’t want to be there. Once my mother was gone, home held nothing for me. I eventually knew that if I stayed in the city I would die. I chose to live.
”My sister chose to die. She is a heroin addicted prostitute still. She chose to kill herself slowly. My mother’s last words to my sister were – ‘Someday you’ll be sorry!’ Those words have been killing her ever since. Sorry she always has been, though no fault was ever hers…. I think I survived because after attempting suicide 13 times I rebelled against following in my mother’s footsteps.”
In her profile at Blogspot.com, Lili lists some very interesting books that many people in this century don’t often read. Among those included are Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt and Main Street., Olive Shreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, and Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. Of these authors, Lili says that they, like so many of her other favorites, are female authors who have been forgotten or never heard of. They are women’s voices trying to speak in and of their time. Lili searches out classics by women who had something to say in their day and their words speak to women today.
All of this leads to the making of the artist Lili G who has posted the incredibly erotic images on EROTICALEE
2: Open Your Imagination. Some may label it porn; others label it art. But I agree with Lili when she says, “I think some people need to label what they see in order to process what they’re seeing. The label allows them to think in a specific way, or maybe not to have to think at all.” For this writer, it is definitely “art.”
Though there are some full body photos of Lil and parts of her husband, who is also a photographic artist, she prefers the very close up photos of her private parts. In this way, she feels, the pictures are less personal. Not only has Lili and her husband used body parts as a way of distancing the viewer from the person in the picture, but she has used digital enhancement to further define the photos and they present a raw lust and eroticism that can only be understood on an emotional level. The images are a blend of hardcore images and imaginative execution that draw the viewer back more than once to revisit the site. It is something women rarely find in erotic photography.
Lili says that she uses about three different imaging programs to obtain the results she seeks. Sometimes she has an end result in mind even before a photograph is taken. She knows what effect she wants to use on it and what combinations of effects in the various programs will produce. At other times she is surprised at the outcome. When I asked if there were any plans for a book or if prints were available, Lili said that she hoped that at some time it would be possible, but neither are available at this time. However, Lili indicated that she and her husband would not be adverse to talking to someone who would be interested such a project.
Though I think Lili would balk at being called an artist for women, I think she is an incredible artist who happens to be a woman. As a woman, I highly recommend both of her sites.
Review by Jewel
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