Category Archives: Creative Process

about the process of the creation of art

Eternal Bliss of a Creative Mind

Last night was utter bliss. I am back to shooting again. It is the first time I have shot since I returned from Europe and it is some of the best stuff I have done to date. An old friend, John, who was one of the original people I began photographing 2 years ago, after I had finished the studio was the subject. It was kind of the turning point for me when I was getting serious about shooting nudes of men. In fact he is the first person I coaxed off Manhunt to come and work with me. We have done several shoots over the years. He disappeared for a long time going on a very long walkabout across the lower western USA for about half a year, so I had not seen him in a while. We just instantly began working and I felt a connection to the process that I have only seen in the works of others. While I was in Berlin I had met a photographer Dragan Simicevic who left quite an impression on me. His approach and style was so simplistic yet contained such magnetism: he only chooses a couple of images from each shoot. I began to feel that deeper connection to John last night and everything we shot was golden. I did not feel my regular compulsion to over shoot, but had felt satisfied with a minimal amount of shots. This is the way I used to shoot when I was working in film, mostly because of the expense and time it took to develop so much film. Last night the focus was stronger and John was right on with feeding me exactly what I needed. He has such a natural presence that he is just fun to watch even when we are not shooting. It turns out he is homeless, so I have offered him the loft above the studio where is can crash for a short while until he can get back up on his feet and he is willing to work around the inconvenience of my shooting schedules.

The new intern, Steven, and I spent the afternoon earlier in the day completely cleaning the studio out and set up the staging and lighting for last night’s shoot. I have worked with assistants in the past on my regular photography but not on this private type of stuff. It is awesome the intensity that he bring to the process, it was awesome to have someone who understood and was as excited as I was to make it happen. Once everything was set up, I used Steven as my subject to begin a series of test to really hone our lighting concept. As we looked at those photos I see what a remarkable subject he will also make and will now work on a shoot of him as part of his learning process. This really allowed me to focus the shooting process for John and allowed for us to jump in so easily because everything had already been set and tested.

The third piece of what made yesterday so remarkable was that the website template finally got loaded and I was able to work on the website last night, loading stuff into it. It is more remarkable then I envisioned. It is fast it is easy and we are going to have a blast putting it together in the upcoming weeks. I am going to target the end of the month to open it on the web. That gives us 16 days to pull it all together.

I also sent a message to John Douglas in Australia to see if we can somehow revive the old Man Art site. I think it’s the same system I am using for my current site and Julian my web guy could totally make it happen.

Focus On Shooting

I have a new kid coming to work with me this afternoon who wants to work as an apprentice. I met with him yesterday and we are on the same page. He has a history of working in male nude photography on actual film. I am still looking for others that want to become involved in getting The Naked Man Project up and running. I see how powerful it can become with others bringing their talents to the table. I have been feeling so overwhelmed for some time. I realized part of my greatest talent as a stage manager was coordinating large theatrical productions on the road and that I am actually quite a great manager and proficient at the delegation of projects. My vision is big and I realize that I can no longer create it alone. Plus I have a lot to teach others so the insight gained would be a great experience. I believe this will eventually become a community project, but first of all I need to get it up and running for myself.

My energy and focus this week will be shooting. I have very actively been recruiting people who are interested in collaborating on images. My goal is to try and shoot something new each day. I know this is ambitious, but it feels like it’s where I need to be at this moment. With a new assistant I can finally focus and hopefully keep up a pace. I am also beginning to focus on the idea of shooting outside and using the natural beauty that surround us for that backdrop. I have a guy that’s coming who is interested in shooting some images of him fly fishing in a mountain stream in the nude. This actually excites me to no end. This is me and really hits of core of my own identity. I spent many of summers hiking the mountain lakes around me, peeling off my cloths and jumping into those waters naked. Someone asked me the other day, why don’t you shoot outdoors more? I really had to think about it. I guess part of it is that with my work in the theater I l really love the control of the light and being able to sculpt with that light. Shooting outdoors takes a lot more work and time and often the light is completely unpredictable: that light being perfect for shooting outside having very narrow windows of opportunity. I often tend to be too busy to actually pull it all together for myself, much less coordinate with others. Also being from Montana, we tend to take that vast beauty that surrounds us for granted. I have great difficulty shooting landscapes because I can’t seem to distill the essence of what I see and feel around me. But the falls in Montana are really the absolute best part of being here.

A New Study Begins

I am starting to reconnect with some of the subjects I have shot in the past and this week will begin shooting with them again. It’s always fun to go back and shoot with people I have worked with before, because you already have that instant working relationship. I have a strong desire this week to get back to that Caravaggio lighting style I began working with at the beginning of the year. The staging and set up for this style seems to take the entire studio space to create the balance of light I am looking for. It’s not just lights, but layers of scrim filters upon filters. More goes into blocking and controlling the light to a confined space then actually allowing the light through. I have today off without much distraction. We were supposed to begin putting the web site together and I had scheduled all day to work on it, but we are having a problem loading the templates and are waiting to hear back from the designers, who are in Europe. Most of the information has been gathered and written and is ready to insert once it’s installed. This gives me today to focus on research and looking through old paintings to find that inspiration for the upcoming shoots this week. This is really the favorite part of the process, researching and figuring out what it should or needs to look like. I saw so many paintings in the Louver while I was in Paris that seemed to contain the feeling and essence of where I want to go. It is to touch the core of raw emotions and get to what makes us vulnerable. One of the patrons I have met suggested that I need to begin a series of self-portraits, exposing myself in my own style. The shooting this week will become an exploration of where that self-examination can begin, of looking at how I fit within the structure of my own process. I am hoping to see a more positive image of my physical self begin to emerge. Sometimes this is the hardest thing an artist must do, set aside their preconceived ideas of who they have become and see who they actually are. Mapplethorpe was brilliant at this, to face himself so unafraid without compromise. I began the year and the first blog with a self-portrait of myself and now it’s time to revisit myself once more.

Relying on the Kindness of Strangers

I have a black old mangy three-legged cat that hobbles through my back yard each day looking for scraps. When I try to befriend it, in the garden, it runs away, afraid of human interaction. I don’t know where it lives or even where it comes from, but every time I see it I feel a strong connection to it.

I have two other cats that I have taken in as strays and nursed back to health. They almost look identical, mostly black with white beards from their mouths to their bellies. Kitty came first, when we were doing the construction of the studio, she was constantly at the site, climbing on everything. She is deaf and we never named her because it seemed pointless giving her a name if she could not recognize it. The fact that she can’t hear has some how gives her a boisterous voice that can become annoying when you are trying to sleep. She was a thin, boney thing with droopy eyes and the studio has now become her domain. Bob came by about a year later; he is named such for his missing tail, and walks oddly because of it. He is mute, and when he tries to speak, only a pathetic thin squeak emits from his mouth. He has recently been diagnosed with asthma and we have three options: we can either put him on steroids which will completely alter his personality or get him a kitty inhaler that is outrageously expensive, or allow him to live naturally with his lungs becoming restricted and eventually suffocating. He too came to us emaciated wearing a purple collar that was ratted around his neck and big curious eyes that made him look like he had just come from a circus. Glenn walks them each night through the neighborhood, allowing them and us to explore their worlds, which they enjoy immensely, and now seem to demand, when it gets dark.

I digress and what I was trying to get to was that I have always had a thing for strays. When I was bartender at a hot gay club in Washington DC, in the late eighties, after work on my way home I would often pick up the young male hustlers and take them home. Not for sex, but random acts of kindness often washing their cloths, letting them shower, and feeding them. They somehow always seemed to remind me of my home in Montana and these little acts of kindness went a long way and I was always rewarded, by the dropping of their street attitude as they allowed me into their private personal worlds. They would tell me the stories of their plight leading them to this point in their existence. It was a world I understood and identified with, the desperation and destitute they often felt. Several years earlier when I was in Dallas, at the end of my first relationship, without a job, I too had relied on the kindness of strangers for my own survival, so to speak, so could relate to them and many of them were from places like Montana. My friends where horrified that I would allow these strangers into the house, dismissing them as the underbelly of the world. Then again, it’s part of my Montana nature to be compassionate and look out for others.

I think it is one of the greatest skills I possess is my ability to communicate with anyone. I see in the work I create that experience and exposure allows me very easily to cut to the core and strip away all the grime with which most people surround themselves. This is the true nature of what I do and why I got into photography in the first place. I sometimes forget this and it feels lately have gotten so far from in my process. I am beginning to line subjects up to begin shooting in the next couple of weeks. I now see this is the core of what I need to get back to in my work. All of this talk of creating shows or exposing my work to a broader audience has distracted me, as I recognize I have grown a bit distant from my process. As I am beginning to build this web site I see this is the real essence of what I do and have been doing all along. I think many people in Montana now fear me for my bold and honest approach. As it feels it’s becoming harder to find those subjects willing to reveal themselves.

Evolution Of A Culture

I am completely obsessed with building the website now and I seem to work on it non-stop. I reached out to many of the talented people whom I have gotten to know over this past year and the whole project is becoming a wonderful collaboration of so many wonderfully talented people. Ideas are abundant, and the possibilities unlimited. I see now that this will grow well beyond myself and am coming up with a vision for the future where part of it will become a platform for others to come together. I have been searching the web for a long time trying to make some sort of connection to others who do what I do, and it has been very scattered. It seems once I find something that is working it suddenly disappears. I am not creating just a website, but a Joomla interface which becomes a dynamic portal engine and content management system that can be shared by many and has the potential to become quite interactive. In a sense, this can become a sort of space that becomes a clearinghouse for gay arts, written, and visual. However, that is many steps and stages away: but it is my long term vision of what The Naked Man Project will eventually become when the blog part of this project ends at the close of this year. Right now I am having a blast just putting myself together as The Naked Man Project and learning the process.

I realize through my many years I have been obsessed with finding my identity as a gay man and the evolution of its culture over the past 30 years. It has changed so drastically from one extreme to the other: being apprehensive and filled with self-doubt and self-loathing now to the point where we can be married in many states. Montana not included. There is so much that has captivated me along the way, wondrous things that can very easily become lost in the shadows of our evolution. Much that the new generation has taken for granted and probably doesn’t even care to know from which its origins spring. But it really begins with the naked self and how we look at ourselves in that mirror each day. I feel a lot of being gay has been a projection on what we wanted to become and a rejection of the values from which we come. We can so easily become paralyzed by our own internalized homophobia. Our safety and security jeopardized by our inability to communicate with each other. Sure, the social networks are creating a web of friends we can interact with, but our decreasing lack of skills toward communication seems to be minimalized to a mere tweet that now must be deciphered to understand its value. Manhunt and Craigslist still rules supreme for anyone wanting to hook up, often without even getting to know their names, merely for a moment of gratification, and then moving on. Why do we still live in a world that values being anonymous? I do have to say the images and profiles on Manhunt are becoming captivating and creative from an artist point of view, as we try to express the core of our sexual/sensual selves as it becomes the new calling card which we hang our identity. But it is a world where a man of my age is shunned from even being acknowledged no mater how creative or witty I become. Perhaps we no longer need relationship or companions. Perhaps our lives have become so busy that we no longer need that interaction. It’s like art, have we become so saturated with it that it no longer contains any intrinsic value. I always envisioned a future where as we evolved as a gay community that we would somehow become closer to each other as a culture. But it has become the opposite, that vastness just grows wider and more distant.

But I also find a vast richness and body of friends on the Internet that are enriching my life and helping me move toward a greater understanding and vision of myself. In many ways it is awesome to stand here at this moment and look out over a magnificent world of possibilities.