OK!!!! Here it is the big day!!!! The website is finally up and running!!!! You can find it at naked-man-project.com. We have put together a limited version to test the site and see how it will function. It’s still a work in progress so there may be some quirky little things that aren’t quit there yet, but for the most part you can get a good feel for what it will become. We currently have eight of the thirty plus odd galleries open so it will give you a sampling of various styles. Sorry I could not get an opening splash page up to warn viewer of the content, but most of you know what that is anyway and will hopefully get that up later in the day. As an option I have chosen to hide the more graphic images from casual public viewing that can only be accessed when you become a registered user. There are ratings at the bottom of the gallery pages, but they are way at the bottom so please feel free to use to give some feedback, you may have to scroll down to find, but am working on bringing them up into the page. And there are comment sections at the bottom of each section for feedback. The blog will now become more searchable via keywords though not all of the blogs have been categorized yet. There is still a tremendous amount of work to be worked through on what’s currently up, but will be refined through out the upcoming weeks as we muddle our way through it.
It feels like I have reached the pinnacle of a wondrous place in my life today. I now have a public home where I can dwell and share my creative spirit. A year and half ago I was too afraid to even show my work publicly and now have a site that totally celebrates what I have become. Thank you to all that have contributed and helped along the way. A very special thanks are due to Glenn who keeps pushing me and reminds me of the practical side of my vision. A huge thanks to Thor for his hours of working through my massive catalog of images and getting them organized and putting so much of the galleries together. Alison you are the female love of my life, you just keep inspiring and cleaning up all my dirty little messes and making sense of my babbling. I also have to thank Ramon who’s giving me the courage when I feel like I have fallen in a dark holes from which I thought I would never recover. This website is a community effort and I have graciously learned this year that it takes a community to create art and survive.
It seems far easier to be creative then it is to actually market or sell your creativity. This is becoming the lesson of this week. This is the greatest leap in my creative endeavor so far since this project began. I think back to the beginning of when I was first getting into photography and the greatest hurdle was just getting my self to the creative table. The beginning of a creative existence is filled with self-doubt and anxieties surrounding whether we are good enough or even talented enough to create. It happens in baby steps. For me doing “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” a 12-week program by Julia Cameron which created that leap in my head that said it was OK to be an artist and the acceptance of myself as a creative being. With each success your confidence grows. The consistence of creating good stuff begins to outweigh the mistakes and, believe me there are lots of mistakes, you reach a tipping point where you become a master of your craft and nearly everything you work on is at least interesting. But it is a long voyage of forcing yourself to the creative process that continually nudged your way to that point of this clarity. The next hurdle seems to be exposing what you create and putting yourself out there for judgment and criticism. Of course this has been my greatest obstacle because of what it is I want to do and the acceptability of it in the culture I live. The first Friday evening of every month all the galleries in Missoula have a gallery walk where everyone is open late and you can wander from shop to shop and see all the new work that is up for the month. It has been a huge success in Missoula because they typically entice you in with wine, beer or some sort of edible treat. But these shows mostly only contain images of western themes or landscapes, the usual sort of paint pealing off the old barn sort of work. If I where to display my sort of imagery I am afraid I would create a scandal sort of thing and my studio would possibly be fire bombed. So this has become a huge leap in my own creative acceptance. The next phase that I feel I am on the verge of overcoming is creating a presence. This is the culmination of the process of this year and the process of search for a place. This phase has been far more creative and certainly more work then the process of creating art where the process of art began. Along each step there is a huge growth and a better understanding of myself and the things that seemed insurmountable in the beginning are now trivial in the end. Why does it take most of us our entire lives to become what it is we desire or aspire to become? Is it that we just don’t know the pathway? Does it become a battle with our own self-doubt? I began this year asking the question from many of my artist friends “Are we born to be artists or is it something we learn?” I now see what a tremendous amount of time and perseverance it takes to create anything. But so many of us put that amount of time and effect into things we are apathetic toward as a means to an end, just to make a living. When the real question becomes what is it that really satisfies and makes us happy. I know most of my life has been lived in uncertainty. But I have had this impulse all of my remembered existence and somehow at this stage it all seems worthwhile.
The coldness is beginning to set in, which indicates that I am coming full circle on the project. It began in the dead of winter and now, as I begin to feel winter come upon me, I realize this project has followed me through a complete cycle of my life. Yesterday I hit three hundred posts through the process of a year. I am beginning to look back through all I have written and created over those three hundred days, for some of the most interesting points to start to somehow work them into the new website. Although I was not sure where I was going in the beginning with this project, I knew I really wanted to go there. Now the goal seems clear and vividly laid out before me. I have never had such clarity in my life. The year began with so much doubt and a real fear of becoming lost or fading into oblivion – the fear of a man dying without ever having accomplished his greatest dream. This project has become the journal of that dream. The daily struggle and exploration in finding myself and the discovery of light, beauty, desire and art. What seemed a daunting task in the beginning now seems to have become a way of existence. I honestly didn’t think I would make it this far. I kind of expected I would end the year in disappointment, having realized what a failure my life had become, and would somehow have to jump off the Madison Street bridge into the cold icy waters in the middle of a cold winter night. But the opposite has now happened. Through the course of this year I have mended all the old wounds and have examined my life in such detail – some of it interesting, some not. I have come to the conclusion that what I have lived and experienced is relatable to so many others I have encountered along the way. I have confronted and made sense of all the nonsense of life amongst the shadows. The new website is really a gift to others who have helped me along this journey. It becomes not just a look at myself, but an examination for others who also live creative lives of desperation. To live in our time and our culture and become a creative soul seems daunting if not near impossible. It seems the world is stacked against us. I am an older man and do not seek fame or glory at this stage in my life, but look for relevance and meaning that has allowed me to live such a daunting existence. Today I feel I’ve crossed into a new arena of my life – one that is filled with possibility and hope and yes, desire. I guess it could be “It’s A Wonderful Life” syndrome – being able to see beyond oneself and find what is truly remarkable about one’s seemingly meager existence. Does everyone look back and say this is the sum of what I have become? I know the struggle is the same for all of us. I guess this is why I am so drawn to art, literature, movies and photography. I see that my seemingly rough life of living on the outside has been extraordinary and filled with a rich wonder. Today I feel lucky.
We have set a target to release the new website for a week from today and we are all working to get things ready to unveil. An excitement is growing within me like I have never quite felt before. The culmination of all our creative efforts is finally coming together in one common place. We have defined and redefined and tested what the process is and have learned from lots of mistakes. And I no longer function as an individual but more as a team. It’s very odd to be able to step outside of myself and begin to look at the creation of a body of work. I know for major artists they always do those sorts of 10-year retrospectives; well this will become the same. This has become of the greatest endeavors of self-examination ever. The Naked Man Project will finally find that exposure I was looking for late in the summer on the European trip. I see that trip as the catalyst that has brought this all to existence. I have recently been reading a book about building findable websites and what makes them successful and see that I have all of the essentials already in place. I now see it has been in place for a long time through the blog, it just needed to be orchestrated to make it more accessible and functional. The key components, I am learning to successful web sites are: staying on topic, filling a niche, is authoritative and certainly passionate, is trustworthy, entertaining and must be appealing to its audience interests. Yet it must be original and maintain the voice of the audience. I think I can safely say that I have met the entire criterion through the blog throughout the year, as so many people have been reading and becoming a part of my world and this project. Now I am totally jacked. I fill like I have finally found my place where I can communicate from my remote little place in the mountains of Western Montana.
Last night a group of us got into a heated discussion about what constituted pornography and what separates it from art. Can pornography be art and vise versa? Since I began this blog the number one post every week that everyone looks at is “Does Showing a Man’s Penis Make An Image Pornographic?” It seems to be the question everyone who works in this field seems to ponder. I know I certainly as an artist explore and often cross that edge. The dictionary definition of pornography is: “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings”. I think the operative word here is intended. Though I don’t really see many of my images as sexual and am not sexually motivated to create them, I became aware last night the impact they have on others. Who views the images and how they interpret them becomes subjective. We all have different interpretations of what we find stimulating or what excites us sexually. When I was younger just seeing a man’s skin exposed got me aroused and stimulated. And yes there was a time in my 30’s I was obsessed and possibly addicted to porn. But as I get older and I become desensitized by so much experience and exposure, I now rarely find things stimulating in that manner. Now it becomes more of an exploration of what it is I remember about that sort of stimulation. Some of my subjects are not prone to exposure and that line never gets crossed, some people are just so damn sexy with their clothes on, how they wear them, and the shapes and textures they create with their presence. Hence the power of fashion. Yet some people look exceptional fully exposed. Everyone is different and the exploration becomes unique for each of them. My role as a photographer is to expose not just their nakedness, but also aesthetic and emotionally. I perceive we live in a culture where we are getting away from our sense of sensual desire. The desire encompasses the entire being and not just parts of that being. My work for me becomes a compass that reminds me of that romantic idealism that has begun to erode from my life. It becomes about how I see myself in relationship to my subjects and sometimes that intention has been to erotically stimulate. So by the dictionary term my work is pornographic. But because I show a man’s penis does not mean the image was intended to stimulate. I have seen so much great male nude art in my life that I no longer zero my focus in on what dangles below, but absorb it for it’s aesthetic feeling. This is why I love art and am fascinated by my necessity for exposure. I got my first glimpse of a man’s penis in National Geographic magazine showing naked aborigines when I was a kid. I remember how sensational it was. I was possibly too young to be stimulated by it then but there was something forbidden about seeing something that needed to remain hidden. Here some 40 years later, I am still pondering its mystery.
