Because apparently men have always been worth painting.

The things that you discover.

Like, I didn’t know that Troye Sivan is really called Troye Sivan Mellet. That Sivan is the ninth month of the Hebrew calendar, usually falling in May or June, and that he was born in June — on 7 Sivan, as it happens.

And I still think he is a ‘dirty’ boy.

As far as art is concerned, Sivan has now popped up on the cover of the latest issue of CULTURED magazine, painted by American artist Sam McKinniss, who also interviewed him for the issue. The result is this rather gorgeous, slightly feverish portrait — and surely some magazine covers are destined to become collector’s items.

McKinniss, born in 1985 and based in New York, has been described as an ‘artist of celebrity’, having painted figures from popular culture and created the cover for Lorde’s Melodrama (2017), arguably one of his most memorable commissions.

He graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2005 before going on to exhibit throughout the United States and Europe. His paintings can veer from celebrity portraiture to lush, pop-cultural fantasy, with the occasional reclining male nude thrown in for good measure.

McKinniss first discovered Sivan on Instagram, when the then twenty-year-old had just released Blue Neighbourhood. He came across him again in 2018, when he saw Sivan in Joel Edgerton’s conversion-therapy drama Boy Erased. McKinniss remembered being impressed that someone from the pop world would take part in such a difficult and necessary film.

And now, years later, he has painted him.

Which, when you think about it, seems entirely appropriate.