Year 2020 Summary

This last year has been full of ups and downs due to the coronavirus crisis, which has had an impact in all aspects of our lives.

Work

For two years I had been volunteering at the House of Illustration (HOI), and slowly I had been increasing the time that I dedicated to the organisation, which was compensated with paid work at the Front of House. I was happy to find a workplace with like-minded people. The best of my experience was only about to improve. 

The Tom of Finland Exhibition was taking place at the HoI in March and I got ready a lot of material like prints and postcards since I had the opportunity to display them in the shop of the HoI due to the similarities of my work and that of Tom’s. It was amazing to attend my first private view in London in company of a friend and meeting Durk Dehner in person. Unfortunately, the exhibition closed shortly after the opening because of the COVID-19 crisis restrictions.

You can still find some of the material that prepared for that occasion on my online shop.

Health

Early last year I was affected by some symptoms related to that rather unknown disease called COVID-19. I felt exhausted for two weeks, I lost my sense of smell and taste for other two weeks. I still was fortunate for not being one of people who have suffered a horrible version of the disease. 

So mostly the month of March was spent in bed and sofa watching 8 Seasons of Game Of Thrones. The only positive side of that month was I could watch all the series of Game Of Thrones. I loved the fantasy, the plot and the characters, and I was sad that it had to end.

Naturism

As for naturism, last year was hard to practice it at all times. In fact, the biggest loss due to the coronavirus was the cancellation of the London Naked Swim. However, we were lucky to be able to go on holidays to Scotland and thanks to the very low density of Scottish population we found very easy to get naked in beautiful places and enjoy our private naked paradises in the Highlands and Islands. Currently, I’m editing a video about that road trip which I’ll release for everyone on YouTube. You can follow my visual blog on naturism @naturistsatyr. 

Languages

A very rewarding part from last year was to learn Portuguese. It was one of my New Years’ resolutions for 2020. It was a great adventure to learn a new language again. I discovered all the new possibilities that we have nowadays to learn new languages. They’re much more interesting and interactive than those available when I started to learn languages as a child at school and later as a teenager for my own personal interests. 

On the other hand, learning Portuguese reminded of both sides of the process as a teacher and a student. The coronavirus crisis boosted my online Spanish lessons and now I have a good portfolio of Spanish students from different countries and in different time zones. It’s a very rewarding job to see my students develop their skills in my native language. At the moment, I still do it in a part-time basis because I don’t want to become a distraction for my artwork.

If you want to learn Spanish with me, contact me and let me know if you’re a naturist too.

Art

My male erotica illustration projects got on hold due to the ups and downs, the stress, the uncertainty of the crisis and the lack of input from cultural sources and inspiration. However, in summer I could finally see the light and I started to get involved again in online life drawing sessions as a model and as an artist.

You can visit my Instagram @male.erotica.illustrator or Twitter @marlon_lorenty to be up to date on my shop and selected work. But if you want to know more about my current projects and all my artwork it’s better to check my Patreon, which I’ll explain more in detail below. 

Patreon

On St Valentine’s 2020, Instagram deleted my previous account and after a month of reflection, I decided to start a Patreon page. I’m very conscious that it wasn’t the best moment since I had just lost all my followers on Instagram and I would have to restart with very few followers and build a brand-new page based on subscription. But I made this decision because I didn’t want to lose again my connections, fans, followers and supporters, along with all the posts that I had only shared on Instagram. I don’t think that Instagram deserves our original content when they just treat us with impunity.

In a month, it’ll be already one year since I started my page and I’m very happy to say that I have two life-time Patrons at the moment. I know, it’s not a lot but it’s valuable because they’re people who support my artwork with no obligations like my family or my partner, they just simply like my work and they can afford supporting me with a monthly subscription. You can check the posts that I publish there. It consists basically of exclusive content related to my creative process, the behind-the-scenes of my projects, and the uncensored content related to my naturist lifestyle.

At the moment, I’ve caught up with my current projects and I’m posting them on the platform and sharing with my Patrons first, before sharing them on social media. 

OnlyFans

Due to the strict rules concerning nudity on Instagram in 2019, I decided to launch an OnlyFans page, where I started to share my naturist photographs. With the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, my fans increased exponentially but it became increasingly demanding and —I reckon—sexual. 

At the beginning I started sharing some naturist self-portraits, sometimes with erections, and later, videos with self-pleasure images. I really enjoyed it at the beginning since as a male erotica illustrator, I am body and sex positive, so it was nice to find other connections thanks to naturism and sex. However, later on, it turned into a one-way conversation with a lot of voyeurs and, on Twitter, a lot of exhibitionists. 

I want to make clear that I have nothing against any of these practices and I respected and liked (most of) my followers very much. But it’s hard to understand and keep a connection with people who barely interacted with me, and the lack of connection added to the vanishment of most of my followers resulted into a loss of motivation to create new content and therefore keep the profile up to date. So I decided to stop my OnlyFans project last year. It helped me understand many things about intimacy, sex, porn, voyeurism, exhibitionism along with naturism and nudism. But I thought that it was time to get rid of that distraction and get back to my male erotica illustration projects and my artwork.

I only keep my Instagram account @naturistsatyr because the Naturist Satyr is still my alter ego, since he sums up who I am when I feel connect to nature, as my naturist-self, and at the same time preserves my sexual-self.

Illustrators’ Fair

One of the highlights of the year was that I participated in an online fair for the first time called Illustrator’s Fair. It took place on Instagram and on Facebook. I was sad to hear that due to the Facebook Community Guidelines I wouldn’t be able to post most of my work since it would put people off the fair. However, it was nice to realise that simply by participating in the fair my Christmas sales increased. 

It consisted of a good bunch of illustrators and visual artists who showed their work on Instagram @illustratorsfair, and in a private Facebook group, we shared personally our work. It took place the first week of December and I got to know a lot of illustrators, along with other people interested in male erotica illustration and naturism.

And you?

As you can see, I have nothing to hide. I hope you enjoyed reading my summary of the year, and I’d love to hear more about what you learned from 2020. 

Happy New Year 2021. This year we’ll all get vaccinated!