@wgacooper
Artist Jaime Hayde's Diverse Illustrations of Gay Love
These illustrations come from Jaime Hayde, an artist based in Northern Spain. Hayde's work focuses on sharing diversity with the world -- from diverse bodies to diverse love. You can find out more about the artist and see more of his work here.
From the artist:
"Within my practice, I aim to translate my feelings into my drawings. These drawings have helped me to find myself and feel more confident with what I think and feel. I grew up without any diverse references, and still remember when I found the first 'gay illustration' in my first year of university. This meant a lot to me because I felt for the first time it was talking to me.
"Through my illustrations, I try to give voice to a love that is often silenced, my illustrations are about love towards others, but above all, towards oneself. In 2019 I started a new life after a huge personal crisis - I needed to reconnect with who I was, and I did it. I had some body issues (some of which I'm still working through) and realized that I was only drawing super-built men. This is fine but doesn't represent me. So I decided to explore and expose some of my insecurities on my drawings, big men, hairy, sensitive, and not necessarily white. I'm a half-black man who has grown up in a white society without contact to my roots so this topic is important for me. I started using 'fantasy colors' as skin tones because I thought that everyone is different and those colors are not related to a particular group. My illustrations are a good way to heal some injuries from the past, a kind of therapy. It's amazing when you get messages from people telling you that your work matters to them."
(Statement from artist continues below.)
"I try to approach love between men as something natural. Many times I get inspired by my personal life and draw my family (my boyfriend, our cat, and our dog), and men who express and love each other naturally and who live day to day, free and proud. I really want to be involved with projects that could help my community, projects that show diverse realities. Nowadays there are many people trying to take our rights, which our predecessors fought and died for. I think it's time to keep being visible and I'm always thinking about how I could contribute to issues that affect us (the LGBTQ+ community) with illustration.
"I am proud of who I am and what I do, and I love showing happy love moments because we are really used to seeing no happy endings when it is about telling LGBTQ+ stories. It is actually a recurrent conversation between my boyfriend and me since we met each other, it always ends in death or sadness. I feel that the sad portrait is not applicable anymore, there are sad stories and dramas and we do love dramas but we also want to see happiness, love, and celebration of our lives. We want to be the ones to tell our stories, because showing happy stories instead of the sadness and fear discourses may help to change some people's minds."
-Jaime Hayde
