tender feeling

Hernandez’s sentimental reasons for adopting the Edgar haircut bring us to camp, that sensibility which Susan Sontag defined as “a tender feeling.”

Something in your vital spirit, your pulse, something that runs in the blood, tells you that you must have this tender feeling of love now and forever, this essence of devoted love held tightly in your grip — that it’s essential and necessary for staying alive and cheating death.

Like Velázquez – and unlike, for instance, Kehinde Wiley, whose blindingly decorative portrait-fictions ham up the theater of power and presence – Hendricks applied a genuinely tender feeling for truth to his project.

At the climax of her essay, she observes: “Camp taste identifies with what it is enjoying. Camp is a tender feeling.”

Stead’s use of charcoal, pastel and crayon adds to the quiet, tender feeling that suffuses the collection.