Category Archives: Art

Art

Releasing The Unflinching Creative Possibility

There always seems to be a moment of truth when the ones that are so close to us leave. I feel a bit empty and lonely this morning as Glenn heads to work in North Dakota for the next couple of months. This happens every year that he goes off to do this particular job, but the first day is always the hardest. It’s a moment where I face myself and begin to put our relationship into perspective. I see how much I tend to take relationships and sometimes the people around me for granted. It is my nature to always be aimed at the target and I feel everyone around me believe so much in my visions, they help me remain focused. I love this about Glenn, he has always seen the truth of what I do, admires it, respects it, and has been supportive from the very beginning even when he doesn’t quite understand it. With Glenn he forces me to take breaks and make sure I am eating and makes sure all the household things are taken care of. I grow so accustomed to everything being handled. I don’t feel like I take advantage of him at all, because I don’t really expect it, but it’s what he likes to do, however when it’s always available I often begin to rely on it too much when I actually enjoy doing so much of this for myself.

These months in the fall are generally my greatest spurt of growth as an artist where I can delve deeper within myself without having to switch directions. I have an ambitious fall planned and now have a lot to do in a very short period of time. It is these periods of isolation where I really explore the possibility of how creative I can become. The studio will now become the total workspace for which it was designed and my focus will become more refined and less inhibited. I now have a web world to create and must absolutely focus on just that. It is still delayed by technical difficulties, as we still have not been able to load the templates. I have been in contact with the designer in England who thinks he’s found the issue so we should be up and working on that in the next 24 hours. The prep work is still in hot pursuit and continues. The new intern came in yesterday and worked all day on creating the image bars, and was very good at it. He worked wonderful on his own which allowed me to focus on writing the text. I have also set an ambitious shooting schedule with sessions lined up most every day for the remainder of this week, through the weekend and the beginning of next. We will begin setting the studio up this afternoon to begin the first shoot tonight. I keep hearing from lots of different people with many different talents that are now offering to jump aboard and help out in some way. I can feel the vision and dream starting to emerge and there is something extremely exciting about all this support from outside myself. It truly is becoming a community.

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.