My most recent short story, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Sex," features a new voice inside the cover art. Pennsylvania-based artist Séamus O`Ceallaigh and I met through the online Queer Erotic Content Creators Club in 2022, and I find his art to be rich and fascinating. So I wanted to interview him for this latest Artist Spotlight, so more folks can learn about his process and his art. Below is a copy of our interview.
Christian Pan: Tell me a little bit about your art and creative activities. What media do you work in, and what sorts of tools do you use? Tell us a little bit about your process?
Séamus O`Ceallaigh: At age 12, I experienced three life-changing events:
1. My father joined an apocalyptic cult and decided to homestead in Texas. I hand-milked two Jersey cows before riding my bike to school.
2. At school I was inspired by a classmate to start writing a novel.
3. Puberty struck in no uncertain terms. (Oh, to have such endocrine surges today!)
All three of these braided intimately together to give me a creative life. It was a life more empowering than the alternative lives I experienced in a cult religion or in the secular world of school.
As to the novel-writing, I very soon began illustrating my stories. As a visual artist I remain a story-teller. I am less interested in the visual impact of my visual works, and more interested in luring people into an imaginative world where everything is sensual and anything is possible. Maybe because I am a refugee from a very puritan sort of cult religion, I was really inspired by the mythological art of the “sex-is-good-for-crops” pagan cultures. In particular, an uncle of mine, after spending years living among monks in the Kingdom of Bhutan, came back not only with naughty stories of pornographic clowns peripheral to the most solemn of religious rituals, but with a vast catalog of Himalayan Buddhist images of gods, goddesses, demons, and bodhisattvas. I fell in love with the erotic polytheism of these images. What this artwork said to me was that life (and death) is magnificently abundant and hyper-sensual. In our mortal coils we are only making baby steps toward experiencing the super-erotic sensuality that exceeds animal life to become creative life.
As to the practical ways I do artwork: I usually present my finished work on a 9 x 12 Bristol Board using Rapidograph pens for black outlines to be colored with Prismacolor pencils. But to achieve this I make dozens upon dozens of pencil sketches. I use mechanical pencils and devote an insane amount of time to nding the right composition for all the visual elements. I use a light table to trace elements to refine them or move them about. I use my scanner to print out multiple sizes of particular elements to find the proportion that most satisfies my visual instinct.
CP: Did you study visual art? If so, where? Who are some of your inspirations or influences?
SOC: I guess I had an interesting art education. I started making book illustrations as a 12 year old and at 18 was hired by a local newspaper to draw cartoons and design ads. I did some illustration and lots of page design at a larger publisher. When the eccentricities of my life finally landed me in university, I majored in Creative Writing but took all the studio art classes I could. I loved oil painting the most, and one day when I can build a studio, I want to return to oil painting.
But my most valuable study of visual art (like all other good things in my life) came from the caprices of my lifelong poverty. During my student days, I made grocery money as a nude model for art schools. While living in Ireland I got money for eggs and peat moss as a nude model, and later in life (too late, you would think) I was a nude model at a really great art school in Chelsea, New York. In college, I was on the student’s side of the easel. I know what happens there. The professor is trying, over and over, to tell the students what it means to engage with art, but the students can’t hear it because they are struggling with the work of art on their easel. As a model, all I had to do was just stay still. To do so for 20 minutes or longer I learned to go into a very calm, relaxed state of mind. This state of mind was extremely receptive to what the professors were trying to explain. During my breaks between poses, I would walk around all the student easels and really see what the professors were getting at. I gained far, far more learning about the spirit, the eros, and the potential of forming a deep relationship with visual experience as a nude model than I ever did with formal instruction.
As to my inspirations and influences, I already mentioned Bhutanese Tantric art. I must mention that I am deeply influenced by the Italian Renaissance. I share with Michelangelo a deep reverence for the human body. I share a desire to find an aesthetic design that isn’t so much an exact depiction of human forms, but an evocation of the sensuality that animates the human form.
CP: Do you approach the creation of erotic art pieces differently than non-erotic art pieces? If yes, how so?
SOC: It is rare for me to get interested in artwork that isn’t about the human body, and I am always revolted and wounded when some censorship issue requires me to put clothes on people represented in my work. I have an irrational hatred of trying to draw clothing. I do draw landscapes, still lifes, non-representational design, but I only engage in these non-human figure works by finding a way to express the erotic beauty I see in form. All my work has erotic intent and feeling for me. If my work is presenting as non-erotic, you can be sure I found some way to make the erotic covert. What makes a visual experience for me erotic is not the mere activity of copulation (although I am highly in favor of copulation as an activity). What makes my work feel erotically connected to me, is my success in depicting the sacredness, the miraculousness, of our souls and bodies. To me the body is just the wick of the burning soul. It’s merely that smaller, cooler part of the soul that is manifest as material. My erotic intent is always to reveal sensual and imaginative experiences. In pursuit of this, I am always looking for what is human in even the still life of a flower, or a shaving horse, or an old broken hoe. As to my explicitly erotic artwork, I tend to shy away from the conventional ways to represent copulation or other fun means by which to share orgasms. I’m more interested in making my work feel something of what the brain feels during orgasm.
CP: Does your personal identity inform or manifest inside your art?
SOC: At age 64 I am still trying and failing to learn humility. I have long tried to be a more acceptable wallflower or well-mannered team player, but I can only shut down my personality entirely to appear to be such a person. I believe this is a result of my survival of a cult religion that willfully attempted to obliterate my ego and self-esteem. I cannot attempt to be me with somehow standing on center stage and being my own glaring spotlight. This is to say that my every creative expression is a manifestation of an intensely self-possessed personal identity. No going back to that puritan droning of hymns in a dreary congregation for me!
CP: Promoting and sharing your work online has gotten increasingly difficult in recent years, especially for any sort of art that includes sexually explicit content or themes. And over the last few months, this has ramped up even more under the 2nd Trump administration. How are you responding to all of this chaos?
SOC: On the morning of November 6th, 2024, I was utterly shocked to learn the outcome of the election. Intellectually, I knew it to be a possibility, but emotionally and morally I just didn’t think it could happen. It is now three months later, and what is vividly clear to me is that I suffered on that morning the most devastating and transforming crisis of my entire life. I’ve had more than the usual share of hardships and challenges, but not even the predatory attempts of a cult religion to cull my adolescent soul comes close to the brutal and violent assault that I experienced in realizing that yes, this nation that I loved more than I realized, is not only done, gone, and forever changed, but it was WILLING to embrace this horrific demise. I have been living in a state of fantasy emigration ever since that day. The circumstances of my life prevent me from actually leaving this country, but I have left it in mind, heart, emotions, and moral attachment. Only in the loss of America and American identity, have I realized just how much my nation and national culture really means to me. Only in losing America have I come to understand how much I loved America. I am reminded of why it was, when I was an expatriate in countries that treated me much better, that I came back to America.
I live in a small town where almost all my neighbors voted for you-know-who. They are good people, good neighbors. They are the rst to help people in need. They do volunteer work. They are compassionate. They are caring friends. I really struggle with what the outcome of the election says about the American people, but I at least know that it’s my responsibility now, to put all that still feels positive about myself into remembering that my neighbors are my fellow Americans. If there is ever going to be an America again, we’re going to have to pull together as Americans always do when there’s a crisis or disaster in our communities.
As to the White House Reality TV show? I have a lot to say. I often say that on November 5th, no one lost an election but everyone lost a democracy. I’m now realizing that Election 2024 was just the final unplugging of something that has been on life-support for years now. For years now we have not had a government, simply because a body of political leaders is only a government when that body is able to govern itself. When in the last 8 years have we seen our government able to govern itself?
But I waste too much energy on that question. Let’s be real, here. What we have in the White House now is only a distraction. It is meant to be a distraction. Our most serious crisis now has to do with social media, and the people who have become unduly influential (and destructive!) because of it. I earlier said we’ve got to work together to become good neighbors again, but the first step to that quite honestly is to diminish the implosion of social media into our lives. We don’t have to abandon it entirely, but we have to stop letting social media replace social interaction. We need to get offline and find real community again. It still exists in our villages, towns, and cities. I live in a very lonely rural place, but during this time the most sustaining thing for me has been my volunteer work with the Parent Teacher Organization at my son’s school. I never expected another drowsy PTO meeting in an elementary school cafeteria to end up being my lifeline to sanity, but it has become just that.
I really admire you, actually: not only for your ability to force social media to become a vehicle for real social connection, but because of the much more vital work you do in getting out to foster communities around you through theatrical groups and independent bookstores, and more.
We all have different circumstances and live in different environments. We all have different reasons why we create erotic content. We all have different ideas as to what the erotic really is or can be. But we all have one thing in common, our humanity. Before the social media takeover, humanism and the humanities were dismantled under the conviction that these were vehicles of racist and sexist colonization. Oddly enough we weren’t so active in dismantling the capitalist economic values of colonization. I have resolved not only to detach myself from social media, but to refresh myself on my own state of human-being. I can’t help but feel when we trashed humanism, we also trashed the art and exploration of being human. Election 2024 feels like the ultimate death blow to our humanity, but it is a chance now (even more compelling than Covid-19) for us to re-examine and hopefully recover our humanity in a new and more compassionate and connected way.
All the above is me responding to the Chaos. How am I responding to social media as an artist? I am definitely shutting down most social media in my life. I got lured into it by a fraudulent idea that social media would somehow make capitalism more fair to creative producers. It would give the creators better access to the market. Some platforms may have believed in this, but they changed. The forces of capitalism have always flowed in a way quite opposite to the trickle-down fantasy. Capitalism is by definition the exploitation of producers to enrich purveyors. If an economic system fails to do this, it is no longer capitalism. It has become free enterprise. Social media promised to be free enterprise, but quickly revealed itself to become a super-amplified capitalism that particularly exploits intellectual property (aka creative output).
When I had my bad flirtation with attempting to be an artist on social media, I soon found myself forced to compromise the most fundamental tenets of my erotic work, the sacredness of the human body. I knew with the first figleaf, I was selling out as every artist eventually will do if income or compensation is ever going to be a concern. I mentioned that my homesteading was the third strand braided into my artist life. Because I am a homesteader, I do not have to violate my creative and erotic intent in order to get something so tainted and worthless as pecuniary recognition. I am also getting old now and letting go of the idea of getting any sort of recognition at all. If Election 2024 has any silver lining for me, it was to make me even more disdainful of public recognition. What our social media environment presents as most worthy of recognition is simply put, repulsive.
I have embraced obscurity as a precious gift. It allows me to be more truthful and audacious in exploring myself and daring to manifest my visions in ways that others can either like, hate or ignore. In my erotic imagination and creative endeavors I have always sought the thing that Pilate doubted to exist, Truth. If there is a seed of Truth in our souls, we must seek it naked and unashamed. Maybe we can all be naked models, calm, receptive and knowing that it doesn’t matter what students see when they’re trying to sketch us. It’s really always been themselves they’ve been trying to find.
CP: A number of artists have legitimate concerns about artificial intelligence (AI), and how this new technology is impacting art created by humans. What are your thoughts on this topic, and how are you responding to the influence of AI into the creative process?
SOC: Recently, my antique computer crashed taking into oblivion lots of artwork and writing that actually I was done with anyway. In acquiring a replacement computer, I was amazed at how all the new applications cajole and bully my every computer task to be on-line or in the Cloud. During Election 2024 I heard all sorts of bullshit from my ill-informed neighbors about the threats of communism in voting Democrat. I thought that was pure fear-mongering rhetoric, but actually it was the typical gaslighting that is our new political/media language. Everything we do and create on our computers is subtly or aggressively hijacked to some sort of gigantic collective. We are now the peasant producers giving our labor to the collective. We are the minions of Information Communism, which wouldn’t necessarily be bad if the techno politburo showed any decency of morality.
My friend sent me an essay that suggested that the whole White House Reality TV Show is strictly meant to distract us from the conversion of our employee-based government into some horrific AI platform that performs all government tasks. If this is true, then it has become apparent to me that all people who use computers in any way are being mined to feed AI. That our thoughts and expressions are being collected to empower a technological coup d’etat of our nation.
Something that gets far less attention than it deserves is that AI consumes a catastrophic amount of electricity, even more than cryptocurrency! If that’s true, what is AI going to do about the climate crisis? If for no other reason than not wanting to contribute even more of a carbon footprint to the climate crisis, I am determined to embargo AI in any way I can.
I am radically diminishing my use of computers in my artistic life. I am handwriting my current novel and will have to think carefully about how I may or may not use my computer to type it up. I am infatuated with the idea of simply producing a handwritten, leather bound manuscript.
AI devours everything on-line without consideration of copyrights, but I’m not especially concerned about my own intellectual property rights. If I were, I wouldn’t create unwanted unpublishable projects. But I am determined to do everything I can to limit my empowerment of AI.
AI can only be the sum-total of human activity on the computer. That leaves the vaster potential of human activity completely inaccessible to AI. Just think of the power that we each have as individuals to censor what AI can learn? Just think about how much more we empower ourselves by exploring the vaster realms of human experience (and human erotic imagination) in ways that AI will never be able to access. Maybe we might need that power for ourselves so that the masters of AI aren’t able to become our masters too.
I really don’t know how AI synthesizes its catastrophic amounts of human information, but it’s worthwhile to wonder if we might conversely feed AI information that would refract it from the intentions of its designers. What if we were able to create content that had the eect on this supposed intelligence that LSD had on the generation that defined the 1960s? Depending upon how the mass of human content aects AI, it may be possible that AI might become a new form of democracy (just as the internet became) where the voice and sentiments of the masses swelled out of anyone’s ability to control.
One of my silly epigrams has been to say that Artificial Intelligence only became intelligent when people became artificial. After considering how Election 2024 may have been the result of dismantling humanism in our educational and civic institutions, there is a deeper dimension to this witticism. There is so much more to being human than AI can ever acquire, but the problem we have now is that few people really appreciate just how expansive and amazing being human can be. We lost belief in our own potential. That wasn’t an accident. That probably has been the plan. I speak from the experience of growing in my own humanity despite the intentions of a very anti-human cult religion. But if we really want to survive AI, and maybe even own it, maybe we need to become more passionately and erotically AUTHENTIC human beings.
CP: What do you hope people will experience or feel from seeing one of your images?
SOC: For once I can give a concise answer. I always want people to look at my work to see the miracle that they are themselves. I want them to realize that their bodies and their sexual feelings are miraculous gifts, and I want them to embrace and share these gifts with joy, love, and compassion.
CP: What projects are you working on now?
SOC: At this exact moment I’ve put visual art aside, and I am giving birth to a sperm whale of a novel. (Ouch. At least it’s slippery.) Being unplugged from social media allows me to go into places deeper than I have experienced before. For one thing, I have started to contemplate death, which is to say that in my 7th decade of life, I am actually considering the possibility of my mortality.
Love is eros. And it was only in trying to write a life-story about a love-marriage between two men, that I discovered the most erotic experience of all. The writing of this novel makes me realize that all along I’ve been writing about death. However, death isn’t the end of life. It’s the intensification of life. I realize in this work that we were born not into life, but into a sort of cocoon. This thing that we think of as a world is really a chrysalis, a web of limitations and deprivations. It’s not even real. Pain, suffering, joy, love, ecstasy are all real. What is real is what we feel, not what we think. What is real is the transformative juices within the cocoon, not the webs of thought that contain it and constrict it.
That which we think of as death is the breaking of the cocoon. We are right to be terrified of death. But the terror isn’t that we shall die (who hasn’t eventually died?). The terror is that most of us don’t bother to live. That’s why the erotic and the imaginative are so vital to us. That’s why the forces of worldly stasis (the Status Quo) are always, always trying to repress the erotic and the imaginative.
When I’m done writing, I will profusely illustrate. Penises, vaginas, butt cracks, pubic hair, the dreaded female nipple (!), and armpit hair (okay, so I have a bit of a fetish about mammalian types) will all be profusely celebrated as the natural gifts of our own joy, love, celebration and vitality, and our magnificent diversity.
CP: Anything you want us to know about? Anything coming up that you want us to know more about?
SOC: The fact that I’m unplugged from social media doesn’t mean that I want to be unsocial. Quite the opposite. I invite communication via that ancient medium called email. It could lead to even more antiquated forms of communication! I really love to talk about writing, art, homesteading, and the Irish language (well, everything else, too). I am presently obsessed with immersing myself in my ancestor’s language, so Labhair Gaeilge liom! Write me at genalundi@gmail.com.
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