Cheesecake

and The Art of the Pin-up

Just the FAQ's, Ma'am

ABPAP is the successor to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.art.pin-up (ABPEAP), which was pretty much abandoned because of the huge amount of spam posted there. So far, ABPAP seems moderately spam-free. ABPEAP still gets stuff posted to it occasionally, which is generally tagged with "ABPEAP" in their subject lines. The legality of distributing the images is questionable at best, but a fair amount of pin-up material is available there.

Other Sources

This brings us to the topic of artists whose on-line galleries contain cheesecake. There are a number of excellent ones.

	Jack Henslee's Painted Lady Gallery Henslee is a particularly talented artist with a fine eye for voluptuous women. His site features pin-ups, mermaids, fantasy, portraiture, and erotic magazine illustrations. I particularly like Jack's pencil sketches. He has a couple of mermaids that are stunning.		Raffi's Portrait of Woman Raffi doesn't bill his work as pin-up, but his site is devoted to attractive women, many of them provocatively posed, so it qualifies. He has nudes, supermodels and portraits. His pencils are excellent.
	Kim Harlow Kim is an artist from southern California who, "draws pretty ladies", mostly in colored pencils. Her site and art may remind you of Jack Henslee, whom she thanks. Kim's earliest works are a little crude, but she shows rapid improvement and her latest work is excellent. She does classic pin-up, fantasy and erotica.		SilkSatin Web What's not to like about an artist who takes her nom de plume from a Will Eisner character and whose influences include Eisner, Matt Baker and Fritz Willis? Silk is a talented lady specializing in pin-up and pop art. Her compositions can be a little stiff and the figures aren't always integrated with props and backgrounds, but she's definitely worth watching.
	The Goddess Art of Jonathon Earl Bowser Bowser describes his art as "Visual Meditations on The Goddess and The Divine Feminine - a quest for the Transcendent Truth in Beauty." and his site is full not only of his art but his philosophical ruminations as well. The art is beautiful and the Web site design excellent. his work can also be found on sites such as Jaap van Deijk's and Magoo's Fantasy Art Page.		Donald "Rusty" Rust I've covered Rusty's work earlier. His site contains glamor, wildlife, illusion, clowns and more. Most of the originals are for sale and thus change regularly.
	Aslan Aslan's work is covered earlier. He has a wonderful web site, covering not only his pin-up work, but his sculpture, fine and commercial art. I particularly like the lead pencil sketches of women in his adult section. They combine the best aspects of his pin-up work with same sort of feel as Henslee's sketches.		Carlos Cartagena Airbrush artist Carlos Cartagena is pretty new on the scene, but he has a quite extensive web site featuring modern and classic pin-ups, mermaids, and fine art.
	Mutoscope World! Mutoscope World is a site devoted exclusively to one sub-genre of Cheesecake: "Mutoscope cards", which were collectable cards from the 40's. The covers the subject thoroughly and has an excellent History of Pin-up page as well as a number of artist biographies.		Edward Reed Edward Reed is an airbrush artist and copy editor for Airbrush Art + Action magazine with a small site featuring pin-ups, mermaids and magazine covers.
	Heather McKinney Chernik Gallery Green is erotic & pinup section of HMC Studios, the home page of illustrator Heather McKinney Chernik. Some of her work, like "Wear Your Protection" is a bit surreal and modern, but other pieces like "Teal" and "Nike Serif", are very much in the cheesecake tradition.		Ric Frane Ric Frane is a talented artist with a somewhat dark vision and an excellent collection of models. With my fondness for La Maupin and such, it should come as no surprise that I like the "Bladed Babes" and "Pirates" gallery. Some of the other pages are a bit darker than my tastes, though.
	Don Henderson Don Henderson's Bikes, Trains, Planes or Dames site features airplane nose art and other cheesecake sections. His style can be a little stark or primitive, but it has a lot of energy and captures the feel of 40's nose art, and how can I fault Celtic Lace, a section devoted to pin-ups in Celtic motifs, two of my favorite things?		Paul Corfield Paul Corfield is a young English artist who is selling his art on the web, and is a published cover artist. Paul is a talented artist, who has grown considerably in the medium since I first added him to this page, and I look forward to watching as he continues to refine his technique.
	The Dave Stevens Home Page This page is run by Tom Ranheim, and not by Dave himself, so I almost didn't include it. But Dave Stevens did authorize it, and has contributed with art, photos, and information, so here we are. The images are small, but the site is very complete.		Kevin Townson Townson runs Pop Culture Emporium, an entertainment memorabilia store and has a couple of self-published comics. His art still has a slightly amateur feel to me, but shows promise.

The Great American Pin-Up

Perhaps the best book available covering the history of Cheesecake is "The Great American Pin-Up" by Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel. The book covers pin-up art from 1920 to 1970, and a bit beyond. It sticks fairly strictly to the classic American pin-up, leaving out more recent and risque artists like Aslan, Olivia, Nagel and the like.

This is an excellent book, both as a reference on classic American pin-up art, and as a collection of beautiful pictures.

Mr. Meisel also has a "The Great American Pin-Up" Web page and runs the Louis K. Meisel Gallery in New York City. His gallery deals in the more realistic styles of art, be it "fine art" or illustration, including pin-ups.

The San Francisco Art Exchange is a fine art gallery in San Francisco which features original and reproduction work by Alberto Vargas and such contemporary artists as the Rolling Stone's Ronnie Wood, and Roger Dean. Their Web pages include an on-line store selling both limited edition lithographs and posters. They also have original Vargas artwork for sale.

One of the readers of this page wrote to tell me about Jim Geuther's Airbrush and fantasy Art collection which includes a lot of pin-up art. The pages are a little crude and many of the pictures are only shown in their small version, but the collection is large and varied.

There are a couple of good sources of contemporary photographic Cheesecake on the Web.

One of the best was J.G. Melton's California Dreamgirls page, which seems to have disappeared. Recently his work has shown up on as A&A Adult Entertainment -- California Girls. Melton is a semi-professional photographer who specializes in Cheesecake shots of amateur models, although some of his models have later shown up in Playboy and such. He brags that he has the finest scans on the Web, and could be right. Most of his pictures are nudes, though he has some very good swimsuit shots and portraits as well. A few of the nudes are what I would call sexually explicit and thus not Cheesecake by my definition. Most are photographic cheesecake though.

Speaking of Playboy, most of the pin-up photography on their web site is Cheesecake. They have one of the most heavily frequented sites on the net, so they tend to stay at the more conservative end of the erotica spectrum. This site features a bit more nudity than this page, but not a lot.

Playboy and Dark Horse comics have jointly developed a site that publishes on-line versions of several Dark Horse comics, including a couple o strips featuring Bettie Page, Adam Hughes' Ghost, and Jim Silke's Rascals in Paradise. The site includes some nudity and violence, but is not sexually explicit.

At one time I though that the Michael Scott Agency had one of the best photographic cheesecake sites. It specialized in "fitness models" and offered both swimsuit and nude photos. Since then they've broadened out into a whole collection of sites, and I think the quality has suffered tremendously. Their typical model now seems to have an extremely augmented bosom, a lot of makeup and no obvious relationship to fitness competition.

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The pictures used to illustrate the styles and artists reviewed here are all copyrighted by their respective creators (or their estates) or publishers and are used without explicit permission. I've done what I can to keep that use within the definitions of fair use.