Something in the air changes and it suddenly feels like fall. Labor Day is somehow that turning point weekend in the United States where the day after summer seems to disappear. It was the first football game of the season, the final family campout, and the last days of the rodeo. This morning I began putting together my fall schedule that will take me through to the end of the year. The University in back in session and I begin a new season of working on their shows tomorrow night. It is also the season when all the new students are back in town and I can begin my process of recruiting some new subjects. I need to get back into my studio again and begin shooting. It feels like I have been distracted the past month or so getting ready and going on the trip that I have not had much time to work on my imagery. I spent most of my spare time throughout the weekend pulling things together for the upcoming new website. It is progressing very well and we should begin putting it up on the server the next couple of days and then begin refining it. I am hoping to have something running by the end of next week, well at least the initial home pages and some of the galleries.
I still have so many images to work through that have piled up. It feels like I start a series and never quite get through it and then never quite get back to it. I have still only worked half way through the images of the trip to Europe and the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo images I took before I left. So I am really going to try to focus on getting caught up today. I have had a few jobs that I needed to complete last week that put me in delay on my personal stuff. I want to work on my yard now that it has cooled outside, but could not even seem to find time for that. The rest of this week I will be slammed but next week it will all begin to open up and I will get back to my fall creative work.
Autumns for me are the times that I accomplish my greatest nude image projects. Everything else begins to slow down as I put the gardens to bed and tie up loose ends from the summer. Glenn typically goes to North Dakota for several months to work on a soil-sampling project and I can totally get into sync with my own rhythm and work at a pace completely uninterrupted. I can work late into the night and often get up early to catch the morning light. Though with this blog project it does seem to eat a good chunk of my day. But there is something about the fall that I feel most focused. I somehow feel this one is going to become on of my most extraordinary ones ever. After beginning this project I felt I have a genuine focus this fall. There are now goals to accomplish and a standard to rise up and create. In a sense I feel like this year of my life has begun to go backwards. It’s like that movie where the guy reverses in aging. I am excited to my core again about who and where I am. It seems the age issues that I have been dealing with have somehow vanished and my life has taken on a greater purpose that is beyond myself.
It’s a beautiful Sunday morning. We about 30 guests over to the studio late yesterday to watch the opening of the Griz football game on television at the studio. They were playing an upper division team from Tennessee. Needless to say we didn’t win, but it really wasn’t expected. Sometimes you just have to compete with others that are better than you to push yourself to a new level. I have not always been a football fan; in fact when I was in college I never attended a game. But when I started dating Glenn he was a huge football fanatic. Our hometown University of Montana team are known nation wide as the Grizzlies. They had been on an amazing winning streak for the past 20 years working their way to several national championships. So when I first met Glenn he said if we are going to be together you are going to have to buy season tickets to the Griz games, and we did. We have the most remarkable seats at midfield just a couple of rows above the home team. Conversely I told him we would also buy season tickets to the theatre. There is a nearby town that brings the National Tours of musical productions to our region. That year he saw Les Miserable, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, Showboat, and Annie. Probably some of the best shows to be introduced into the power and spectacle of theater and I donned the apparel and entered the realm of college football. I can’t say how utterly captivated I became with going to football. At first I didn’t know much about the sport, in fact nothing. I saw them toss a coin at the beginning and then they would scramble and bash into each other, everyone yelling “get the quarter back, get the quarter back,” and I thought what a lot of fuss for twenty-five cents. No seriously it was not quite that bad but I love that story. There was something about football that rocked me to my core. There is a collective patriotism that fills a sea of people that utterly overwhelms your senses. It becomes a visceral reaction of the most primal nature as bodies collide in a test against strength and strategy. To see men, so well tuned in body, mind and spirit to put every once of their being into a team effort to come out of top as a winner. I realized my life has been this focused in mind and spirit but not body. Football for me also appeals to my core erotic psyche that is also very stimulating. Hot men in overly tight uniforms that show off all the greatest assets of their youth and manhood, out there struggling with each other. I very quickly became obsessed with the sport and fell in love with football. Eventually learning the strategy of the game. I actually bought a book on Football for dummies that I read in secret to bring myself up to speed of all the various positions, rules and plays. I remember Glenn found the book in my office and came out with a sheepish grin. I guess he knows it was love as he found my closet desire to learn more about something he was so passionate about. Football has also brought me closer to my father, because along with our seats I added another for my father. I knew he was very passionate about the sport playing in high school. Suddenly we had found a commonality and it was one of the things that broke that ice between us, opening the world of communication between us. My fascination with football has waned a bit over the past couple of years because as I have begun to put my focus elsewhere, more into my art. But there is defiantly a raw, venerable sensuality that exudes and inserts it’s way into my work and gives me a fearless strength to boldly pursue it.
I recently found an old journal about the first time I actually went home with a man and spent the night. The date was March 1 1982. I would have been 20 years old and we ended up picking each other up at an old video arcade that is still in existence here in Missoula today. There are not many details in the notes, but in my head I flashed back to a very vivid cold night, when my body trembled with fear. The sheer panic and confusion I was feeling floods my mind again as if I am standing in that darkness, alone again. I was a couple of years out of high school and knew that I have always had a strong desire to be with a man, but for some reason I just couldn’t quite come to terms with possibly doing it. The video arcade was a way to have encounters with others without really having to make a commitment, always somehow felt it wasn’t quite real. It was a dark world filled with black light with neon signs that glowed vibrantly in the darkness. Anyone with a white shirt took on a haunting purplish glow. You really couldn’t see the faces of people, because skin tones disappeared into in a dark haunting haze. The place was a maze of walls with hidden openings, covered by curtains and the whir and clatter of films being projected into glass screens within the little booths. You could hear a coin drop from anywhere in the places and then the muted/muffled voices of people talking. Back in those days, people actually did talk to each other in those types of films, as inane as it may have seemed then, adds a certain humanity that is lacking today. But it all happened in darkness. A touch, a kiss, someone feeling my crotch, a quick encounter and then they would disappearance back into the darkness. Once I had discovered the place, I didn’t go there very often. Perhaps 3 or 4 times over the course of a 3-year period. I remember living in the dorms on campus and after one of my visits rushing home to immediately jump into the shower and try to scour away any traces of the encounter from my skin, often my body eventually becoming consumed by sobs of grief that I had allowed myself to go back to that place of such desperate temptation. Then eventually after another 5 to 6 months I would find myself lurking outsides it’s doors in the darkness of the street waiting and watching working up my courage enough to enter its seductive labyrinth once more.
Today I begin to move into the last phase of this project. Hard to believe I am two thirds of the way through it. Wow what an adventure it is becoming and it’s amazing where it’s been in such a short time. My focus today and probably this upcoming week is on creating a website; but I am having great difficulties trying to figure out where and how it needs to go. I have been looking for templates but am not finding anything I really like that I fit into and I have been working with Adobe’s Dreamweaver to see how I am able to modify or create my own, but that is proving to be difficult as well. I have decided to call in an expert who can help me figure it out. So this afternoon’s about meetings to get started and see what I can come up with.
It’s time now to make the leap and begin working toward exposing my work on a broader market. I have been having many dialogues with several people over the past weeks and since my return trying to come up with a plan or outline on how to best orchestrate what I want to accomplish. First and foremost I realize I must begin to consolidate all of my work to one place, where people can come and find everything about this project and me. One of the main issues I am currently dealing with is that I have two separate identities. One is me as a portrait photographer under my company name of Cyr Photo LLC doing wedding, family, senior portrait, headshots and Arts and Entertainment. This part of the photography business over the past couple of years has been declining, with the saturation of too many do it your selfers and the wannabe photographers eating away at the market. The second part is creating these nude art type images more out of experimentation and exploration of this Naked Man Project. The two cannot merge and must remain separate for me being in Montana. I have sort of taken this year off from my from my regular photo business to focus on getting this project underway and seeing if I can make some sort of business out of it. So far it has been a lot of fun and I feel I am growing as an artist, but I am beginning to realize that it’s going to take a lot of time at self-promotion to get where I need to be. As much as I have worked to make it happen, I have not seen any revenue from the nude side, and still have to rely on other work to stay afloat. So I am to the point where I need to begin promoting and working toward both sides. Therefore I have to create two distinctive different promotional approaches and formats and am having a hard time right now figuring out what the priority should be. I can see the art photography gaining momentum and have begun dialogue to begin finding that focus and if I begin to pull back any, all I have worked toward can very quickly disappear. I now realize they are both something that I must put into the mix of my daily juggle.
