It’s official, it’s the first day of winter in Montana, and I woke up this morning to see the trees above my bed, through the skylights covered in a blanket of white snow. To me this signifies the turn of the season as this also signifies the turning point of another phase of my life and existence as an artist. The chosen sampling of galleries for the website were finished last night and many of the bugs worked out through out the day so it will be officially up and running tomorrow morning. I am cleaning up link adding articles, and getting the blog transferred over today. Wow what a trip this has been!!!!! A peaceful calm is settling into my body this morning as I ride the edge of nervous energy of anticipation. I remember this feeling well from my days of working in the theater. It’s the dress rehearsal right before the show opens, when you know everything is in place and you are ready for the audience to see the production and you are just tweaking and refining the details. In a sense my entire life has been a production of some sort. As a kid I was always producing something. I think back to my brothers and cousins and all those shows I made them create in the barnyard on summer eves when we were little kids, they some how always believed in my crazy ideas and followed my strange endeavors. Will I always be this creative? Probably so, organizing the senior citizens in what ever center I end up in our scooter carts creating some sort of show.
I finally got a good night’s sleep last night and sleep in this morning. The truth is I feel like I could sleep for a week.
It’s game day in Missoula and I am still not feeling too well from the nasal thing that I have been fighting all week and so I have opted to stay home and watch the game on television, bummer. Though today’s image isn’t naked, I have to be with the Montana Grizzles in spirit so I am posting some images I took a few weeks back so I can feel like I can be there in spirit. Now that I think about it I feel like the Griz players about to emerge into the arena through the cloud of smoke to a stadium of avid and adorning fans. GO GRIZ!!!!!
The good news is I am catching up with myself and getting all the stuff done around the house that I have been neglecting for the past week.
It seems far easier to be creative then it is to actually market or sell your creativity. This is becoming the lesson of this week. This is the greatest leap in my creative endeavor so far since this project began. I think back to the beginning of when I was first getting into photography and the greatest hurdle was just getting my self to the creative table. The beginning of a creative existence is filled with self-doubt and anxieties surrounding whether we are good enough or even talented enough to create. It happens in baby steps. For me doing “The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity” a 12-week program by Julia Cameron which created that leap in my head that said it was OK to be an artist and the acceptance of myself as a creative being. With each success your confidence grows. The consistence of creating good stuff begins to outweigh the mistakes and, believe me there are lots of mistakes, you reach a tipping point where you become a master of your craft and nearly everything you work on is at least interesting. But it is a long voyage of forcing yourself to the creative process that continually nudged your way to that point of this clarity. The next hurdle seems to be exposing what you create and putting yourself out there for judgment and criticism. Of course this has been my greatest obstacle because of what it is I want to do and the acceptability of it in the culture I live. The first Friday evening of every month all the galleries in Missoula have a gallery walk where everyone is open late and you can wander from shop to shop and see all the new work that is up for the month. It has been a huge success in Missoula because they typically entice you in with wine, beer or some sort of edible treat. But these shows mostly only contain images of western themes or landscapes, the usual sort of paint pealing off the old barn sort of work. If I where to display my sort of imagery I am afraid I would create a scandal sort of thing and my studio would possibly be fire bombed. So this has become a huge leap in my own creative acceptance. The next phase that I feel I am on the verge of overcoming is creating a presence. This is the culmination of the process of this year and the process of search for a place. This phase has been far more creative and certainly more work then the process of creating art where the process of art began. Along each step there is a huge growth and a better understanding of myself and the things that seemed insurmountable in the beginning are now trivial in the end. Why does it take most of us our entire lives to become what it is we desire or aspire to become? Is it that we just don’t know the pathway? Does it become a battle with our own self-doubt? I began this year asking the question from many of my artist friends “Are we born to be artists or is it something we learn?” I now see what a tremendous amount of time and perseverance it takes to create anything. But so many of us put that amount of time and effect into things we are apathetic toward as a means to an end, just to make a living. When the real question becomes what is it that really satisfies and makes us happy. I know most of my life has been lived in uncertainty. But I have had this impulse all of my remembered existence and somehow at this stage it all seems worthwhile.
On website overload today trying to get everything ready for the Friday launch of the new site. So far it is all going well, though it is taking a lot of time to get everything functional. Lots of details as it feels we are working around the clock to make it happen. Thor and Danny have been staying here at the studio the last couple of nights as we all work from three computers on separate areas of the project. I can’t seem to sleep and worked until 3 in the morning, cleaning things up. The internal structure is becoming far more complicated then I originally anticipated, but the surface will seem simple and easy. Working in this new medium that has not been completely developed yet makes us have to adapt to make it interchangeable and adds to the complications. I keep wondering what on earth have I gotten myself in for. Thor seems like he is on the edge of burn out and I worry about him a lot as he works through the galleries. Glenn just takes on logistical things and seems to solve those sorts of issues I don’t have the patience to work. I am trying to work on linkage and overall look of the site. We are so close and it may be a bit rough the first couple of days. The weather has turned nice again and I keep looking outside thinking I wish I were out there enjoying these last days of fall.
Last night a group of us where sitting around the bar at the studio looking at some old vintage porn magazines and remarking at how erotic and sexually enticing this type of imagery used to be. What I mean by vintage is 80’s magazines like Men and Playgirl and the likes of that. In these images the guys are not your perfect well-defined bodies like what we see today, but where average guys seem to have a presence and actually looked like they were completely enjoying exposing themselves which I think added a level of accessibility to indulge the fantasy. These were guys you could possibly pick up on the streets or could even have been your neighbor next door, for a place like Montana. I once had a friend who worked in the business say there are three major things that qualify you for porn, one is good looks and a connection with the eyes, second was a good body that we would want to hold next to us, and the third was having a big dick which would satisfy the sexual portion of the illusion. He would say a person would need two out of these three qualities to make it in the industry and the combination could go either way. In modern porn it feels like we are often verging on actually containing just one of elements whereas in the vintage 80’s porn every single model seem to possess all three, page after page, after page, after page… The photography was sensational, most featured models would begin with a page with them dressed and somehow placed in their everyday environment. On a horse, in their back yard, a construction site, an actual garage. Great detail was placed on making these subjects normal and the photographers of this era paid great attention to the detail of the light and environment. Many of the images were actually quite a bit sexier with their cloths on than without them on. It was fantastic, the more I looked the more I began to realize that it was actually this type of photography that drew me into photographing these sorts of images from the beginning. There was a time when the great male photographers like Bruce Weber and Steven Underhill brought there level of expertise to this media rising porn to a artistic level and the photographers became an important part of the illusion. To hell with art, I just wanted to indulge my desire and live the fantasy of my dream centerfold for May, and there where enough in each magazine that I could have one for each week until the next publication came out. So what has happened with this beautiful world of tantalizing and teasing of most carnal need? It seemed to begin disappearing long before the Internet become popular. Was there just an over explosion in the industry and a shortage of models and extraordinary photographers? Did the industry decided to cut cost in order to produce quantity? How is it that the thing that becomes so enduring to all of us becomes so depersonalized without any sort of interest to wrangle us with its seductive enticing power? This is the industry that makes more than probably any other industry in the world, so as the price escalates on what we pay for why doesn’t the quality escalate? Wouldn’t they have more money to spend on upgrading the quality? Perhaps I am just a romantic at heart, I do like my sex dirty, but I still what to believe in the world of erotic fantasy. The Internet is paved with lots of dick; perhaps after a while it all begins to look the same but I still want to dream and live in a world where people are human, where I can shake their hand and have a conversation, and be pulled in by their mystical seduction.
Sorry no blog yesterday, every time I sat down to do it I would get distracted by something else. It was one of those extraordinary fall days outside that was sunny and unusually warm for this time of the year. I had my nephew Brenden come over and help me clean the property and prep it for the winter. I somehow thought I would be able to put him to work and I would get to write and work on my computer. But he is not very experienced and I began to realize the work of pruning and cleaning the beds was only specific to me. It was so beautiful out that I just decided to stay and get everything caught up. Then we had Glenn’s mother for dinner in the afternoon, because I had a wedding consult at 5:00, to shoot a wedding next month, and had to attend the dress rehearsal for a University production at 7:00, for a shoot on Wednesday night. When I got home it seems a bit late to blog so I settled in with Glenn. This seems to be the extent of all of my days.
