For this Manhattan painter, lowdown sex inspired highbrow art. In this article I met and interviewed Valentin Tatransky about his paintings inspired by pornography – which he describes as ‘a celebration of humanity.’ Valentin was well-known as an art critic in NYC by this time, but we connected over his artworks which honored the gods and goddesses of the x-rated screen. I share this article to portray his art and legacy.

Valentin Tatransky, the painter, lives in a tiny room in a very glamorous building on lower Broadway. One of the Rolling Stones lives across the hall. Cher is supposed to move in next week.

This may not mean anything to you, living in Michigan or wherever you live, but it means something to Valentin. The building has style–two huge marble columns at the entrance, Art Deco murals in the lobby. Valentin Tatransky loves style.

Valentin’s room is like a chapel. Big, beautiful paintings adorn the walls. They are the stained glass windows of his imagination. But the paintings disturb Valentin’s serious art world peers because they are explicit sexual images. Their inspiration comes from hundreds-no, thousands-of porn magazines and video box covers. Valentin Tatransky is a porn buff, a connoisseur.

“You are self-destructive,” warns his art world friends. But that does not stop Valentin from painting.

“If I had not been going to that university [NYU Graduate School] on 42nd Street I would never have gotten involved in all that porn,” says Valentin. “I don’t know why I need this stuff for inspiration. Somehow I feel there is a higher power at work.”

Valentin believes in a higher power. Idolatry is his religion and his paintings are his idols. His latest painting is a portrait of X-rated performer Stacey Donovan. Her eyelids are lowered to slits, her thighs are spread, her fingers open her cunt. He has painted Hyapatia Lee riding atop Erica Boyer; John Leslie fucking Diana Sloan; the face of Vanessa Del Rio; the black star Desiree West, who holds a cock to her breast while she administers a hand job…

I picture Valentin late at night, the hours he prefers to paint, adoring his idols with each intimate stroke of his brush. “One measure of a painter is the intelligence with which he lays paint, this opaque, gooey substance, on the canvas,” says Valentin. He talks about the paint tenderly as if it were something alive.

It was Valentin’s intelligence that made him an exciting person to interview. Though he is also an art teacher, it was not as if I had gone to a lecture. His mind was all over the place. We discussed painting and sex and porn and religion. Sometimes his tongue was loosened by vodka and I kept waiting for him to stop making sense, but he never did. Our meetings were spread over several weeks and usually played to a background of gospel music or Roy Orbison.

“My favorite all time singer is Archie Brownlee, who died in 1960 at the age of 35. He was lead singer of the The Blind Boys and he sang songs like ‘Walk Together Children’, and ‘Leaning On The Everlasting Arm’.”

I am in Valentin’s room surrounded by his idols. The choirs sing. We have just come from dinner where Valentin had a difficult time making choices. He finally decided on a main course, but when it arrived he ogled mine so enviously, I offered to switch. He chose two desserts. At my place, I had offered him wine, coffee or Perrier. He asked to have all three. When he critiques art, Valentin constantly makes choices. I asked him why there were some choices he found so difficult to make.

“It is a paradox,” he said. “You cannot be a connoisseur unless you have lots of experience and make lots of choices. But to be really good, you must be willing to make a lot of mistakes. I suppose you have to like making mistakes to be really good.”

When it came to food, Valentin made sure that he covered his risks. When it comes to art and porn, he is constantly sticking his neck out.

One criterion Valentin used in choosing photographers as inspiration for his paintings really amazed me. He likes the magazines in which the colors are blurred. This is in essence a printing mistake, but to Valentin it gives the photographs an extra dimension, a lurid psychedelic quality that makes the sex even more visually shocking. He holds up the photo of Stacey Donovan. The colors are a mess. But in that lurid mess, the model shines like a beacon, a radiant madonna-hair aglow, cunt on fire.

“I am sure the guy who published this magazine has no idea how good he is.”

I tend to agree with Valentin but he makes me wonder. I had always assumed that a book with such lousy color separations was the result of an uncaring, penny-pinching publisher. I never thought there were people who actually preferred this style of printing. It is so sleazy. Ah, yes, it is so sleazy…

There is a sleazy element in the life of Valentin Tatransky, painter, teacher, art connoisseur and intellectual. It is reflected in his personal sex life.

“To me, I suppose Dolores represented some sleazy ideal…” Dolores was a toothless black woman who hung out in Penn Station. Valentin met her on 42nd Street. They had an affair. He was fascinated by her capacity to devour pornography. Together they watched live sex shows for hours, she leading him. Or they would stroll through the porn shops day after day, week after week.

“She was very crazy,” said Valentin. “You couldn’t stand behind her. And if you were drinking a beer, you could not leave that beer and go to another room. She would freak out.”

Valentin and Dolores did a lot of drinking together. “She liked sex in slow motion, very slow, very intense. He thought this was in part because she was an alcoholic.”

Valentin speaks of Dolores with awe. She had style.

As I am about to leave Valentin’s place one evening, Veronika Rocket and Michael Clark arrive. Veronika and Michael and Valentin are lovers. It was through these two filmmakers that I met Valentin Tatransky. He wrote the script for their hardcore movie, I Know What Girls Like. I am happy to see them but I decide not to stay-not just because it is late and I am tired, but because I feel the sexual tension in the air. They are eager to start, especially Michael.

The next week, when I ask Valentin what happened after I left, he gives me a slide show. I hold the tiny pictures up to the lamp light. Veronika stands with her arms out-stretched; her open bra hangs from her shoulders and Michael plays with her nipple. Valentin kisses Veronika. Michael kisses Veronika. Michael kisses Valentin.

“First we got high and played around with each other in my room. Then we went to a sex club and did something public with Michael as the center of attention, and Veronika leading him. When we got back here we switched roles a lot and continued. The excitement is not to all have an orgasm together; the point is to go on for hours, glorified hours of ecstasy. Drinking and drugs are a good preface for sex. They help you recapture what society takes away. Sex is the new dawn.

“Michael and Veronika are sleazy, but they represent to me emotional ideals. They are sensitive and brutal at the same time. To say that you cannot have sex with someone you are not sexually attracted to is a fiction. I am not physically attracted to Veronika or Michael, but because I am emotionally attracted to them, they in a sense become sexually exciting. They satisfy my desire for self-love. You get sex rolling in different ways.” Valentin concludes.

I ask Valentin if he ever uses his paintings in his masturbatory fantasies. “No, the paintings are an entirely different thing. That is not their purpose for me. But I did jerk off once to this photograph of Stacey Donovan.

“When I jerk off it is a big deal for me. I become this immense historian. I see a roll of images on various levels and the images start very slowly. The dismissal of masturbation as just a physiological response really irritates me. To me, masturbation is not a given-it is something that I have worked on for years. The relationship between my hand and my mind and my penis is a very fine relationship. I can be turned off by myself as well as by someone else’s touch. I’ll even call the whole thing off if I think the climax will not be worthy of my body. It is different for me at 35 than it was at a younger age. Now I have a rich history.”

To hear someone speak so passionately and so reverently about a subject that usually draws embarrassed snickers, is music to my ears. There are so many questions that I want to ask Valentin-questions that plague me about the relationship between what is beautiful and what is “dirty”. Where do art and porn meet?

“Art and porn both extend pleasure,” says Valentin. “According to the ancient Greeks, the pleasure principle has two poles: the Apollonian side, named for Apollo the god of light; and the Dionysian side. Dionysus was the god known for his debauchery. The Appollonian side is the artistic side. The Dionysian side is the grunting, groping side. Both produce pleasure.”

“When did we become ashamed of our bodies?” I asked.

Valentin talks softly and quickly, the information spilling out from his brain. “The idea to cover up the genitals did not spring from a need for protection or modesty-it was to maintain the spiritual idea that man is god. In ancient Egyptian art, the pharaoh’s genitals were always covered. His sons could be naked. The only ones, as far as I can remember, to depict god the father as completely naked were the ancient Greeks. They got the spiritual values hooked up very well with the sensual values. But they had a rough time sustaining that concept. After one wave of puritanism-inspired by Christianity and Mohammedanism-all of the phallic, sexual religions were wiped out.”

“So pornography is really a celebration of humanity.”

“Yes,” agrees Valentin, “that is the best way to put it. You see things more directly than I do. I’m more roundabout. I put up a lot of filters. But I am trying to be more direct. I think that is one of the reasons I see Veronika and Michael.”

“Does thinking about them excite you?”

“The excitement comes and goes. At work during the day I get excited thinking about them, about what they represent and what I can do with them.”

“How do you choose which photographs to paint? What are the important elements?”

“I go through tons of porn magazines in a book shop and maybe I find one or two photographs. The trick is to pay attention to my initial reaction: yeah, this turns me on. Then I look for unity. I ask myself: Are all the parts in the picture connected, but not to the point of being bland? Does the pic.ture have contrasts? Is there tension that comes from an interweaving of the parts? The tension within this unity results in what we experience as the pleasure of contemplation.”

He points to the painting “Something I Found”, which was based on a photo he found, quite by surprise, in a friend’s apartment. “I like the idea that the man is being kissed by one woman on his lips and kissed by another at the same time on his penis. He is kissed and he is kissed. I spent two hours of concentrated time painting his penis to get it just right. I did not want to fuck up on that. I was more nonchalant about the couch.”

We flip through some of the magazines in Valentin’s collection. He poo poos some photos and finds a few that he considers striking.

”A photographer does not have to be intelligent to get a great shot. He can just be lucky. But a painter must know what he is doing when he puts the paint on the canvas when he creates the balance between the light and dark tones.”

Valentin looks for many things a photograph, but in the end it comes down to the model.

“Loni Sanders does the best hand jobs. Even when she writes about it she shows that she has a highly developed sense of touch. She understands when to apply pressure, when not.

”Vanessa Del Rio knows a hell of a lot. She is always good to watch. This person [he points to Desiree West] knows a hell of a lot. My favorite image is the missionary pose, but sometimes it is the attitude that transcends everything.

”I like all of the male performers when they are actually having sex. I like John Holmes, John Leslie, Jamie Gillis, Tom Byron, David Christopher … A few are atrocious when they are acting, but when they are fucking, they are fine.

“The women I paint are a sort of Hellenic ideal. It is a certain type of look that shows a lot of experience. Yes,” he says in answer to my question, “that is the same quality in the expression of the Mona Lisa.

“What are you going to do … ?” asks Valentin, gazing at his paintings. “Are you going to look at that or are you going to read books like this-?” He plops a copy of How to Avoid Stress Before It Kills You into my lap. “I mean, which is more meaningful?

“Maybe I should take the advice of the students in Staten Island who told me, ‘Hang around with us, you’ll get laid.’ Maybe that’s all there is to it and all this is unnecessary. But somehow I think that’s not all there is.”

Valentin and I plan to be photographed for ADAM. I arrive at his place for my last visit with a very fragile, very beautiful white lace dress in my bag. I don’t know how old this dress is, or its history. I know only that it is very special to me. I wear it when I am happy.

Much to Valentin’s delight and surprise, I strip and slip into the dress. Valentin changes into his morning suit, a bit concerned because it is nighttime, but in a festive mood. We leave the building arm in arm-he in tails, me slightly nude. We are the epitome of style.