Category Archives: Art

Art

Maintaining the Artistic Integrity

Are you getting tired of hearing about the website yet??? It’s all I can think about anymore and seems to consume my every thought. The process is as frustrating as it is exhilarating. I am not a techno geek and am more of a goal-oriented guy so when I hit a block, become very frustrated. There are so many settings and possibilities for options that I just don’t grasp and I can waste hours on one thing that turns out to be so simple. Julian who helped us set up the system seems to have abandoned us and we are left to flounder as we learn and try to figure it out. On the other side, we are making major leaps every day. We are finally loading the galleries today and I think the overall look and functionality if very impressive.

The fun part is that I have continued shooting through out this web process and had two shoots the other day, both vastly different, which means I had to reconfigure the set up and lighting scheme for the studio. The studio just seems to become a hubbub of activity constantly now. The shooting is becoming more focused as I now have a cleaner vision of what I want and need. I have been mostly working with subjects I have worked with in the past, so it’s easier to jump right in and get going. I am still maintaining and need to keep my focus on the original integrity of where I began this process and have not deviated from that, but the images are improving with each session and subsequent shoot.

Many years ago I only dreamed of being in a place like this and now here I am in the middle of it all and things are coming together. Having the assistants is making a huge difference in how I create. It’s actually allowing me to focus on my process as they work through so much of the detail and I get to jump in and oversee it for maintaining the artistic integrity.

Don’t worry I will be back to some of my interesting stories soon, once we get this thing rolling and I can begin to focus on other things.

Idealistic Explosion of Talents

It’s like suddenly The Naked Man Project is kicking into overdrive and I am in heaven. Everyone in Europe and patrons I have been meeting through my social networks had all advised me that I needed to create a presence for myself, to begin to define and refine what it is I want to do. This is the most essential step of my process before anything else can happen and before I make the next step. In less than one month that presence is beginning to emerge and I am seeing a remarkable wonder and extraordinary beauty I have not recognized in myself in a long time. And yes I did get outside yesterday and worked in my garden for a couple of hours; as I transplanted delphinium and cleaned beds, suddenly, all that I have been doing came into sharp focus.

Now that Stephen has done all the housekeeping on most of the image files, I have begun working through each shoot, subject by subject. Wow, what an incredible group of people I had the privilege to work with and explore my creative process with over the years. And they are all here, from Montana. I am now skimming the cream of the crop of each series and extraordinary things are beginning to reveal themselves. I now am beginning to see more what others have been saying about the images for some time. I am often reluctant sometimes and find compliments hard to receive. It’s part of my backstage personality of those years in the theater where I remained hidden, but was the controlling force that kept the show and companies running each night. I tend to also be a fairly humble guy, who believes in keeping everything low key and simple, not the case anymore. This is becoming one of the greatest adventures of my life, every day now is filled with excitement, joy and wonder. My time in the garden yesterday also taught me that this does not have to happen at breakneck speed and to actually savor and enjoy the process as it unfolds. I am so jacked for when I will get to reveal this creation, but know I do not want to rush it or get sloppy.

I met with a new intern yesterday that I am actually jacked about having him join us. His name is Stopher, another gay kid that is funny, witty, smart and cute. He is going to take on the blog element of the site. We have found a module that will import this existing blog into the new site without much loss, and minimal adjustment. The new blog will become easier to archive and search for things. It still amazes me how massive my thoughts have exploded into this format. To be honest I thought we were going to have to start over, or somehow painstakingly transfer it one posting at a time, so I am much relieved to know it will be quite simple.

The Naked Man Project is now becoming a team collaboration of local talents and distant advisors. It feels much like creating a show in the theater where all of us function at our most brilliant capacity and are having a blast pulling it together. We challenge and push ourselves each day to see such huge progress. A show in the theater takes months of planning, preparation, rehearsal and tech before the curtain rises. I need to remind myself each day of this process and take a deep breath as I step into the beauty of this extraordinary work I have created, with which I have now surrounded myself.

Organizational Essentials

It feels like Montana is heading into fall already. The nights are getting very cold, though we have not had a major frost yet. This is typically my favorite time of the year, when I actually get out and begin cleaning my gardens out for the season, but this year I feel like I have become oblivious to what’s happening in my outside environment. This morning as the sun is streaming through the studio windows I realize what a shut-in I have become this fall. My focus and energy has completely shifted to The Naked Man Project, 24/7. In many ways I have become obsessive about it. The website is completely taking shape and the overall structure is set. Stephen and I are working through the massive naked catalogues I have amassed over the past 14 years since I took up photography and doing a massive sweep of housekeeping elements I should have established early, but never quite kept up on. I did it for my photography business, but never really for the nude portfolios. The catalog is so massive that we needed to begin copywriting, rating, sorting and key wording all the images so it becomes searchable and manageable. The galleries are built in the website, now we just need to import the images into those galleries. To do a web site of this nature I really cannot just turn it over to someone else and have them build it, because it is my personal connection to each of these shoots and collection of images that will make the project and site interesting. So it really needs to maintain the integrity and vision of what I conceived from the beginning. And the way the Joomla platform, on which the site will operate has already been designed, so the look and feel have already been established; now the content just needs to be inserted, most of the content, here of course, being the images. Stephen is becoming very good at recognizing what I see and am looking for in my own style, but he is still not quite up to speed, so the final selection and elimination needs to remain mine. I had no idea I had such a massive collection of images. One of the reasons I have neglected this kind of housekeeping on my collections was, I never really intended them to be used for anything. So my lesson and advice to artist is to come up with a filing system that you can grow into. Take the time after a shoot, once you have created the images to do some housekeeping on them, make it a part of your workflow, even if you never intend to use the images. Believe me it has taken me years to figure out a filing system that makes for easy access. I use the Adobe Lightroom Program because it has so much depth to the possibility and it one of the most powerful cataloging software programs available.

But most important I am going to take a couple of hours this afternoon and get out into my garden and rut around in the dirt and feel the cool earth in my hands and get back to an essential part of myself I have been missing: my connection to Montana in the fall.

At the Core of a Creative Existence

I watched an interesting movie yesterday while I was moping about, called Séraphine. It was a French movie about an average woman, leading a life of hardships, doing whatever jobs possible in 1927 France and who had a passion for painting. She thought she was given a blessing by god that pushed her to follow her gifts. She did not really understand why or where the divine inspiration actually came from, but was compelled to paint at whatever the cost. She was a middle-aged woman, older than myself, living in a place and time of poverty. Yet she found the greatest joy in nature and collected items from her environment to temper and color her paint, blood from a cow liver, mud from a creek, flowering plants by the roadside. She brought these elements into her small one room living space and spent the nights grinding these items into her paints, then created amazing images of that nature in vivid almost childlike impressions. The woman who played Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau) was mesmerizing at bringing such honesty and truth to the character. In the end she is discovered as an old lady. The success drove her mad, and she spends her last 10 years in an asylum, disconnected from nature and painting as her imagery becomes legendary.

I saw so many parallels between Séraphine and myself. For many years I have worked in a world of seclusion, being compelled to create something that I never quite understood. I have worked many jobs, just trying to make a living in order to survive. I know my desire is for the naked male, it is my divine inspiration. My connection to my own desires is so strong it often becomes intoxicating. Yes, I know gay men are supposed to become obsessed by sex and the flesh, but somehow it’s not the sex that I am drawn to, it the emotional feelings and what is stirred within those moments before or after sex that I am most fascinated with. It almost seems, to physically touch someone dispels the allure and the touch often leads where I have been so many times before, becoming lost or blinded by its emotional entanglement. I caress my subjects not with my hands, but with the light. I adore their beauty, idolize their skin for its soft silky textures and the way the light glistens on the nape of their neck. Sex is actually the furthest thing from my mind when I am shooting. Sure there are those moments when I become aroused by the process, and it is those moments when I know my images will gain their greatest potency, because I am truly in touch with the erotic core of my process. As Séraphine brought her connection to nature into her vision, I bring that world of sensuality and seduction I have known and longed for into my vision. I realize now it has been the core of my life. I am romantic at heart, I have always been romantic. I spend my nights grinding all the elements of my existence into the tools of my pallet. I have yet to make any money on this process and live my life on the edge of finical struggle. I have the skills, talents and tools to create something that is more viable and commercial, but then it’s really not my vision anymore and becomes something created for others. Though my style and approaches have changed, I am still true to myself and it still remains the journey into myself. I do fear the influence success could have on what I do and I think in many ways it sort of holds me in this place struggling to survive. I am the most content when I am creating. Though my focus is shifting toward self promotion, I still can step back into my world of beautiful light and find the security of those remarkable highly intimate moments with my subjects when the ordinary is allowed to become extraordinary.