Conundrum

I am nearing completion, I think, on a latest painting. See In Tangle on my website, http://www.lanceeldert.com/. It has been an interesting process and frankly is going in a different direction than planned, but not off topic. This is fine, in fact, welcome. It’s a piece of the method I enjoy even, the unknown and the exploration. Also, one hidden benefit of working a painting beyond the original scope or intent or design is running into problems that inevitably crop up and solving them. If enough of these problems crop up and enough solutions are found, a style emerges on its own, a sort of characteristic of one’s method. This is seen in treatment of edges, surface dialogue, and the like.
The Conundrum then is that those things are the details, the gears and structures, not the overall impact or concept. When you step away from the painting after working on the small bits you take in the whole picture. The picture in this case is an amalgam of nudity and insinuated sex, crotch shot and all, with gravitationally pummeled breasts. I have been fine with this all along, but if I am no longer just painting for me, how much utility does this particular painting possess? Nudity is one thing, but full frontal with an exposed, um, gap, is possibly quite another. For a brief moment I considered the idea of pulling a Klimt. He would often paint the whole body then cover it with his constructs of design or renderings of clothing. It isn’t thought he was doing it to amend his original intent in anyway, just that he was finding the dimensions and placement of parts before continuing. My brief consideration was not this at all. It was a thought to make my painting palatable to the public for display. This, of course, flies in the face of artistic freedom and license and is presumptive of me to even think this would ever be an issue, but that then is the question, what can the public tolerate or better yet, what is appropriate today? Where does our mainstream lie? Nudity for the Greeks was normal, nudity for middle America, not so much.
Granted, my first response is, “there is no issue, nudity is natural and makes a better narrative,” and I still think this. It’s the second thought that is causing the problem. The third thought? That one is Ok too; it’s the second that gets in the way. If I were to craft a painting a day I believe the issue would go away. So does this mean the question is economic? Enough time and energy is spent on each one that each one represents a larger share of the aggregate and it is this that determines the viability of a career. To be clear, I am not talking selling out or buying in necessarily, I am talking omitting some subject matter until I can adjust my production vs. time ratio into more prolific territory. That would happen with more success which, in turn, translates into more time to paint by replacing the day job. More paintings mean more freedom.
If there is an economics professor or coffee shop philosopher or fellow artist I would love to hear from you. If you are a dry cleaner clerk or chicken kicker your advice may require a pinch of salt. Yes, I just wanted to say chicken kicker.