Category Archives: Art

Art

Featuring A Sexy American Painter

I have the first featured painter and visual artist on The Naked Man Project website today.  The artist is my friend Tom Acevedo in Boston, whose paintings I have admired for such a long time, who also happens to be a very sexy hot man.  Just wish I could afford one of his images for my studio.  We have created a profile for him in the featured guests section and you will be able to link to a gallery of his work and see his comments on the images.  Now, along with Alison, on the literary end and excerpts from her writings, the project seems to be growing and is heading in the direction I had envisioned from the beginning.   Now that you can see how it’s going to function, I am still looking for other creative souls to contribute.  Contact me if you are interested.  The site is currently registering about 50 to 100 people an hour, so there seems to be a lot of traffic glancing at it.  We are now a little over two weeks since the initial launch so it all feels great right now.  We are still suffering from an occasional broken link and not sure sometimes how they happen, but I am beginning to realize it is part of the process of growing and learning it’s functionality so please bare with us as we work it out.

Now I can get back to work!!!!

Moving Ahead

It feels remarkable to finally have some time to focus on things that most interest me now.  I just need to process this wedding and then the remainder of the year will be working full force on The Naked Man Project website.  It feels like we are finally beginning to tame the beast of understanding how the project functions internally.  New artists have been submitting works and I have been building galleries for them.  The first one should be up in the next couple of days and I have to say for the first time in months, I am quite excited by the prospects of potentially where this project can go.  There are so dang many talented people out there that have been hidden or that very few people know.  I feel like I have finally found my place and am creating a place of expression for artist wanting to deal with identity and the nude male.  This vision that I have been dreaming of all year now becomes a reality.  There are still people commenting on the old Blogger blog and I would encourage everyone to now move or begin posting in the new blog.  I cannot transfer your comments and I would love all that you are saying to become a part of the permanent record of what this project is becoming.  I have always seen myself as a collective artist and strongly believe in art as collaboration.  This includes feedback from both artist and non-artist.   If it stirs a feeling or emotion and it is worth documenting or expressing your opinion.   I know this sometimes takes a lot of time to log in and do, but it becomes worthwhile and meaningful to others.  It is our goal to have everything cleaned up and the site fully functional, with most of the bugs worked out and formally release the site, on December 1st.  My goal then for the month of December is the begin opening up all the galleries, and get the featured artist section completely functional.   I then want to close out this year by getting back into the studio and shooting new works.  I began shooting some new stuff last week and it has a fascinating new edge to it.  Then in January, I want to begin working on reviving the old Man Art with its original creators to build a social network, that was the original source that inspired me to ultimately begin this project in the first place, and build a home for fearless creative expression.  This is only the first phase in something remarkable about to emerge.

The Exhaustion of Joyous Occasions

As much as I tried yesterday I could not find a half hour of time to even get on my computer.  It was Montana State vs Montana Grizzlies, Brawl Of The Wild Game at Montana State in Bozeman.  The biggest game of the season, the Grizzles being the underdog ranked #7 in the nation against the #1 FCS team.  Needless to say it was an upset and the Griz beat the Bobcats 36-10.  Since the game was in Bozeman, Glenn planned a party in the studio to watch it on television.  So my day began with a breakdown of all my lighting equipment and hauling to the basement.

I also had a later afternoon wedding I was booked to shoot.  It was an all day process of prepping and shooting that from early afternoon through the reception late last night.  I love weddings, but they a tremendous amount of work for a photographer.  The process of preparations takes several days leading up to the wedding as well as becomes all-consuming on the day of the event.  My process and approach for weddings is much the same as my process for nudes.  I like to get to know the couple so we all become comfortable with each other and I just become a part of the wedding party.  I love candidly shooting all day as events unfold.  I approach it as an insider documentary style and get great results because most of it becomes very candid and allows everyone to just naturally become who they are as if I am not even present.  I completely engage and interact as a participant instead of as a casual observer hired in from the outside.  I then put the entire wedding together as a series of slideshows put to music that becomes the couple’s remembrance of the day.  Most often when they come back to the studio to see the final presentation both the bride and groom are so deeply moved by the presentation, they become weepy.  I have so intimately entered their world and captured the essence of who they actually are and often capture things they were completely unaware of happing around them.

My approach to the wedding as well as all photography is to first assess the natural light and merely enhance what it already there.  And yes this becomes quite a challenge with weddings because you are constantly bouncing around from space to space throughout the day.  The bride’s chamber, the groom’s chamber, hair salons, the church, the altar, and the reception hall.  I typically will go to all the locations days ahead and test shoot so I know specifically what I am dealing with.  This is one process that doesn’t get easier with each wedding because each one is in a different location or space and each wedding is uniquely its own.  There is absolutely no formula to follow.  Yes the sequence of events are the same, and I know better what to look for, but they are never consistent.  I love weddings for this reason.  It’s like highly emotional theatrical events that unfold before your eyes that you become caught up in.  Some one said to me last night, you have one of the best jobs in the world getting to shoot people at their greatest moments of joy.  I paused and thought about it for a moment and replied, absolutely it is one of the pleasures of my life.

But by the end of the day, I am utterly exhausted.  I feel like I have poured my entire soul into the day.  I often don’t realize the soreness until I collapse on the sofa at home, then it settles in and I can barely move.  They have always exhausted me, even when I was younger.  I realize I had been working for 8 hours solid with very little breaks, yet I feel elated because the images I saw though out the day were so beautiful.  This was my last big event I must shoot of the year and know I can now begin to focus on my naked men.  But today is a day of recovery, very little of anything else.  I am scheduling a massage for the afternoon and nothing else.  I will sit with the kitties in the widow and watch it snow outside.

Navigating the Labyrinth

Made a huge leap with the website yesterday and last night.  We have finally been able to connect it to RSS to create feeds and social links.  We have also linked to Google Analytics so we can see how people are using the site.  These were the last major missing pieces to this labyrinth of a project.  Now I can begin to focus my energy more on the content and less on the structure, and I can openly release the site and begin promoting it.

I am still missing the splash page and can’t seem to figure out how to add it with this Joomla 1.7 system.  Each day we get closer.  The blog section is now completed with links to feed.  If you are currently using the old RSS feeds, please convert them over to the new site as I would like to close down the other blog.  The new site has a very good search engine that enables one to find almost any post instantly.  Danny has been working diligently on breaking all the past blogs into topics that can now be accessed from the list on the left hand side of the panel.  We will begin to focus more of our energy on creating a monthly gallery of the past blog images so they may be readily browsed.  Then I will create a master list of titles that can also be indexed and will become searchable.  It’s amazing to think I have created so much text in such a relatively short period of time!  It suddenly has become a massive body of work for someone who is not a ‘writer’ to have created bit by bit.  I wish I had created this website first – it was my intent to create it much sooner – but I just couldn’t figure it out.  Now it has taken ten weeks to get this whole thing up and running as it is.  My total cost on the project so far has been $135.00 for the entire site.  But the learning curve has taken a lot of time and effort and trial and error to understand its dynamics and functionality.  Although very technical, it has also been extremely creative to figure out.  Once I begin to add the content to the site I will begin to market myself as an artist, collaborate with other like-minded artists, and begin recruiting new models to become subjects for my various studies.  So far, being in Montana, I have had great difficulty gaining the credibility to be taken seriously by potential subjects.  “You want me to what?????” is the common response.  There always seems to have been a sense of perversity surrounding the idea of men exposing themselves nude, or partially nude, that has been the source of greatest resistance.  It is the process of establishing myself with quality tangible images that I believe will make me more accessible.  After all, it is about creating the images, and my connection to the subjects, that brought me to this sort of creation in the first place.

The Passion Of Mythic Gods

Wow a morning and afternoon completely free with nothing scheduled!!!  It feels like months since I have had a window like this open.  The only thing I have to get done today is my posting for the day on here.  The ground outside is now frozen and winter in Montana becomes very slow for business that allows me time to focus on my creative endeavors.  This is the time of year I get to shut myself into the studio and just focus.  Shooting and the website will become the heart of what I do all winter.  I love to make soups in the winter and fill the space with savory smells and invite others into the space to work on new concepts and ideas.  I haven’t even had a chance to think about where I want to go next.  I know the website will become a major focus as we begin to hone and refine it.   I have begun to order some new books on male nude art, with a focus on painting.  I have now proven myself as a photographer and now need to focus on images that get more to the heart of who I am.  Topics I am most interested in are Greek and Roman mythology and I see how powerful its influence has been on so many other artists.  What is it about these images that are so deeply connect to us?  Is it the classic beauty or the actual myth that tugs at our heart that we want to identify with?  I am particularly drawn to the theme of Orpheus, the idealism of intoxicating music that lulls us and being so captivated by another that he is willing to risk going to hell in order to retrieve it.  It has been in my head for years and how we tell this story is not entirely clear yet, but is worthy of exploration.  I am quite surprised that this is a story that has not been reworked for cinema.  The theme is universal and captivating.  It seems we all live in an era of loss, a time where we all search for desire and to be connected to something we want to love.  We forget how beautiful and poetic life becomes as we begin to build barriers to encase and surround ourselves.  I know I have.  It seems life becomes more of a struggle just to maintain a normal existence.  The theme of loss of a part of oneself and what we need to do the recover it fascinates me and basically has become the primary focus of this year.  As an aging man, I want and need to revisit what was once vital to my youth.  But is seems the darkness of life surrounds and often shrouds us locking us into a protective barrier that we often cannot overcome and so we become stuck in a place we may not necessarily be comfortable or even happy.  Though I have lived a creative life most of my adult life has remained hidden behind this curtain.  Now that I have reached this place of comfort and security within my own self I begin to ponder, why did it take me so long to get here?  What was I really so afraid of for so long that held me back?  My life has certainly not been easy, but then I know neither has anyone else.  I am beginning to think our plight is to struggle with finding meaningful existence, yet I remember a time when I was so idealistic and my dreams wider then the ocean.  Now I have crossed those oceans and the idealistic dreams are back.  But it feels there is a huge hole or gap in the middle of my life filled with loss fueled by uncertainly and loss.   I think this erodes at the core of our self-expression and breeds doubt.  I think it is the mythology of hero that surpass the insurmountable odds that become so iconic and perhaps this is what mysteriously draws us to emulate them.  It’s defiantly worth of the exploration.