I interviewed (via e-mail) Artist & Founder of PornSaints.org, Francesco D’lsa who lives in Florence, Italy. Although his English is quite good, it is not his native tongue. He is referred to by his group as the PornPope.
PornSaint SOPHIA DEE
Who? Why? How? When? (Did you) Come up with the idea for PornSaints?
The idea is mine. Why? Because as an artist I always worked with female models, sometimes softcore models. More or less two years ago Gregorio, a friend of mine told me: "Why don’t you work with porn stars?" and I came up with Pornsaints, a perfect synthesis of my interests: pornography, religion, philosophy and art.
What kind of problems/e-mails/protests have you had with religious people who are upset about you classifying porn stars as saints?
We got some hate emails from crazy bigots, and from some crazy people who thought that we are a "real" Church. But we had not real troubles because Pornsaints is mainly a philosophical and artistic concept. "Our" saints are not "their" saints, as I wrote in my brief essay, the concept is really different. After all, we are respectful of every religions, and we are free to think of God in our own way.
Have all the pornstars that have been used as models seen the artist’s rendition? Who was happy? Who was unhappy?
Our artists work in touch with the porn star, so every model has seen the final artwork. Usually they are really glad with the results, but when it happens that the Pornsaint doesn’t like the artwork too much, we change the artist and the artwork. We want our Pornsaints satisfied with their artworks.
What stars will be featured in the future?
We have many "works in progress" still unpublished like Misty Haze, Brooke Haven, Ava Rose. We canonized her sister Mia, now we canonize Ava. We’ve got a couple pieces planned in the future with Dana Vespoli, Athena Hollow, Aurora Snow…
Beautiful work. Reminds me of Gallery of the Absurd.