Mal Martel {Fine Erotic Art​}

Acrylic on paper mounted on 24x48 canvas Price: $4000 This is a modern narrative version of an earlier painting called "Fire and Lust." The panels are arranged like cells in a superhero graphic manga and involves the story of a female ninja infiltrating a crime syndicate's shipment. She steals their secrets, encounters a henchman, and fights to escape to the sea. The full story can be read in a sub-page, along with detailed images, in this website.

Acrylic on 24x18 canvas Price: $2000 One of Theseus' crimes in the downside of his life was the abduction of Queen Hippolyta, ruler of the Amazons. In any Classical myth painting, it would be typical that the scene be non-erotic and placed in a landscape that looks like the pleasant Arcadian pasture with rolling hills (a boring academic bourgeois formula). In the spur of the moment, I decided to express how awkward our empty modern times are when used as a backdrop to erotic myth.

Acrylic on 18x24 paper Price: $1000 A larger version of the tiny screen "Taken by a Giant Eel," this image is a more easily readable composition. I must admit that this painting was a rush job to meet the deadline for the Tucson Erotic Art Show, and, as a result, is not as interesting and spontaneous as the tiny painting that inspired it. However, the facial expression of pleasure is more powerful in this work. There's potential here for improvement.

Colored pencil wax on 11x14 paper Price: $540 Based on the linocut print of the same title, this is a work of sadism in the underworld where Theseus is punished for his several crimes, including kidnapping and impregnating Queen Hippolyta. His torturer is only revealed as the finger of a sorceress delivering a tiny bolt of lightning to his genitals, leaving the viewer to wonder if Theseus is experiencing pleasure or pain, or both.

Acrylic on 20x16 canvas Price: $1700 Originally named "History of Spain," this work comments not as a satire of Spanish history but rather a fantastic description of the sexy genetics that make up the attractiveness of Spanish culture in all its broad complexity and depth. The Roman, Visogoth, and Moorish conquests, as well as El Cid, the Conquistadors, and machismo of bull fighters are all embodied as the black Minotaur. The female fighter represents the fertile earth of Spain.

Acrylic on 40x30 canvas Price: $5600 Based on the linocut print "Wrestling with a Courtesan," this painting exchanges the characters in the print with an Ama pearl diver and the Greek mythological god. I wanted to intertwine their sea-bound genes in an almost violent sexual union, the two different universes colliding and creating a new universe. I believe it's the semi-violent nature of this image that compelled the jury of the Seattle Erotica Art Festival to reject it in 2018.

Acrylic on paper in 9x5 Chinese souvenir screen Price: $775 This project was a spontaneous one. I bought a souvenir desk screen from Chinatown in Los Angeles. I thought the mass produced landscapes were no longer interesting and thought about replacing them with tiny erotic paintings and imagined the screen to be a life-size furniture piece that shocks polite company. Here, we have a native oyster diver seducing a tourist who engaged in the same activity, an encounter that began in the deep.

Acrylic wash on paper in 9x5 Chinese souvenir screen Price: (see "Oyster Beach") This is the image on the other side of "Oyster Beach." It was inspired by many woodcut images of divers and swimmers being ravaged by ocean beasts, especially works by Hokusai and Masami Teraoka. Here a giant eel has taken a surfer girl off track through a bizarre maneuver through her bikini bottom. Her action taking out a shellfish knife is too little, too late, having been overwhelmed with pleasure.

Acrylic on 9 x 15 hard board Price: $975 Heavily influenced by Japanese woodcut prints, this piece emphasizes the energy of Spring. A Marine has just proposed to his girlfriend and the positive response has triggered a spontaneous sexual arousal that causes a Sake bottle to spill. Signs of spring, the energetic squirrel and the burst of plum blossoms, frame their drama and provide a counterpoint to the dreariness of Modern architecture. I regret the modernity.