Queer n There	Queer n There Archive

Amsterdam-- In the hoity-toity world of art, with all its status-mongering and vicious bitch-queen one-upmanship, there's something instantly endearing about a painter who boasts that his canvases of nude men hang in a number of British hotel rooms and have the advantage of being cheap to buy. Certainly from the standpoint of a hotel bed, and what goes on in it, Dan Wondergem's renditions of male torsos and genitalia are nicer to look at than, say, The Riverscapes, The Flower Studies-- or The Wallpaper, into which all hotel-room artwork tends to fade.

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Nor will Wondergem's preferred medium-- acrylic administered through airbrush-- earn him cred in high-art circles, in which aerosolized plastic paint stands to oils as Cheeze Wiz to aged brie. And, to be honest, Wondergem's images have-- at first, casual glance-- a patina of the unextraordinary to them. Not a criticism-- in a world oversaturated with endlessly mechanically-reproduced over-the-top images, where the ready availability Warhol's 15 minutes of fame has become both an appalling cliché and the excuse for grotesque slaughter (think Columbine, think of who Bush will be bombing come late October), Wondergem's unobtrusive nudes represent, maybe, art's cutting edge.

Not that that's where Wondergem puts himself. "I am 49 years old and I am painting a long time," he tells The Guide. "About 15 years ago I started to paint with an airbrush because I was tired to paint with ordinary brushes. I had to learn the technics by myself because I have a common office job. So, I started to learn the airbrush to handle at night, and this costs me a few years. Later I started to give lessons in the evenings with the airbrush, because there are no schools for it. The last years I try to make conventional work and try to make some money with it. Mostly the airbrushers works on helmets, motors and things like that-- paintings as well, but mostly women pictures, so I try to do the opposite." And suddenly he's getting written up in a gay magazine. "The art I make is not expensive because I want to make art for anyone to have," Wondergem adds. Think about US$300 a canvas. For more info, contact the painter at dewo@zeelandnet.nl.