Tom of Finland famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

If I don't have an erection when I'm doing a drawing, I know it's no good.
-- Tom of Finland

#Drawing
I know my little 'dirty drawings' are never going to hang in the main salons of the Louvre, but it would be nice if - I would like to say 'when,' but I better say 'if' - our world learns to accept all the different ways of loving. Then maybe I could have a place in one of the smaller side rooms.
-- Tom of Finland

#Nice #Dirty #Drawing
In those days, a gay man was made to feel nothing but shame about his feelings and his sexuality. I wanted my drawings to counteract that, to show gay men being happy and positive about who they were. Oh, I didn't sit down to think this all out carefully. But I knew - right from the start - that my men were going to be proud and happy men!
-- Tom of Finland

#Gay #Men #Thinking
The abstract, especially in those rough sketches, is very important to me, perhaps because of my advertising background, where layout is so important. Sometimes those first few lines cut the paper into such satisfying shapes that I don't want to go on, but I always do, adding nostrils and nipples and bootstraps until I have filled the paper up as usual.
-- Tom of Finland

#Cutting #Important #Usual
My whole life long I have done nothing but interpret my dreams of ultimate masculinity, and draw them.
-- Tom of Finland

#Dream #Long #Done
I almost never draw a completely naked man. He has to have at least a pair of boots or something on. To me, a fully dressed man is more erotic than a naked one. A naked man is, of course beautiful, but dress him in black leather or a uniform - ah, then he is more than beautiful, then he is sexy!
-- Tom of Finland

#Beautiful #Sexy #Men

I had drawings that were the first time that mathematics was put into visual form.
Iwas a sculptor.Butthat'sreallydrawinga drawing you fall over in the dark, a three-dimensional drawing.
You always feel the drawing you are working on is the best you've ever done... I am only interested in the present.
Cursed in earth and subdued by death, man found himself beset by time, and his instincts put to the test. Only then, he realized that with love he could survive, and that for a certain purpose he would toil. For those whom my love can not immune from death, are dedicated these paintings, in the hope they may express in drawing the reality of a resonant mind.
Drawing is like the first kiss. It carries within it the deepest emotion and the challenge of the first step. It is the first cry after birth
When I draw something, I try to build some kind of history into it. Drawing an object that has a certain amount of wear and tear or rust; or a tree that is damaged. I love trying to render not just the object, but what it has been through.
I keep drawing the trees, the rocks, the river, I'm still learning how to see them; I'm still discovering how to render their forms. I will spend a lifetime doing that. Maybe someday I'll get it right.
To draw a tree, to pay such close attention to every aspect of a tree, is an act of reverence not only toward the tree, and toward the earth itself, but also our human connection to it. This is one of the magical things about drawing -- it gives us almost visionary moments of connectedness.
If we master a bit of drawing, everything else is possible.
I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

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