“Throughout my artistic career, which has included visual arts, theater, filmmaking, etc., my studio work recurrently engages the interlocking themes of morality, sexuality and spirituality. My largest body of work to-date are figurative drawings and paintings. Despite the distorted proportion and stylization of these nude portraits, these are ultimately studies of the individual. With these psychological portraits, I focus on qualities and not purely the physical features of the subject. Intimacy is an essential element, so these works are ultimately meditations on humanity.

Because of my experience as a queer person coming of age during the AIDS crisis, I feel a personal responsibility to be visible and active in my field and the world in general. So many important voices of my generation were tragically lost to that pandemic. I feel a duty to cultivate progressive ideas and images which convey a sense of compassion, curiosity, and humor, I aspire to offer my audiences new possibilities of self-acceptance as well as embracing difference.

I maintain that sexual expression and liberation does not threaten order. It is an important part of our biology and as natural as appetite. I’m interested in all elements of the human experience and believe that the integration of sexuality within the whole, complex person is vital, healthy, and natural.”

– Heyd Fontenot