I like Instagram! It’s the first social network I’ve been part of and have enjoyed enormously the images and responses on it. It’s a very different world from the usual studio routines of drawing and painting. From the first time I went into a life drawing class at evening school, two things struck me forcibly, and are still with me to this day; that there was nothing sexually arousing about looking at the model,  and that the reason I was there, to learn how to draw the human figure, is exciting and important. Both these impressions surprised me with their strength,, so I am always caught off guard when, for religious or social reasons, people object to representations of unclothed figures.

I was recently warned by Instagram that some of my images breached their community policy which appeared to be – no representation of the unclothed human body whatsoever.

This was the latest offending image;

The argument that children over the age of thirteen will be corrupted by the above, as opposed to all the other images they are bombarded with, is not reasonable. True pornography involves coercion and cruelty of one kind or another. Most of what is classed as porn is ridiculous, tasteless, and certainly not erotic. Artists such as myself are trying to promote different values and try to place the human figure, including eroticism, into the context of generosity, wonder, celebration, humour and skill.

I was, briefly, because of an automatic complaints mechanism, taken off Instagram but reinstated thanks to the representations of a friend, Joel Hughes, so well done them for having at least some means of appeal.