This week I am working on the logistics of cleaning the website and working on its functionality. I have created a section set up for other contributors. I am hoping this section will showcase other artists in other forms of media including history, cinema, music, literature, and other expressions of art. I am currently looking for others who are interested in writing short blurbs or showcase current projects they are working on. I am hoping to make it a sort of news outlook. It does not have to be current; it can be historic, social, or a personal outlook or observation. If anyone is interested in becoming a part of the project, you can reach me via email. We are looking for different perspectives on the theme or subject of exposure, men naked, or nude male art in general. It can be gay, straight with no real gender limitations. I am hoping to make the site more interactive with other artists and contributors. The site overall tends to be very visual so the more visual the better. Through out the year in the blog I have written postings about movies, books, and other artists who have inspired me and fueled me as an artist. It is my dream that this will continue to grow and that the Naked Man Project can become a place where others can come together and share ideas, thoughts, and concepts of the creative experience. When I began this blog project at the beginning of the year, we seem to have limited options and outlets for this sort of expression. I was a member of all of them. But through the course of the year much of that has been shut down and no longer exists. Though the outlets no longer exist the expression remains the same; we are still creative souls creating our art and expressing our ideas of what we have become. I began this year’s blog process as a means of communication to other artists and it seems to grown way beyond its original intention. There are many followers still, some of you I know have been with me from the beginning and I sense most of you have some sort of creative thoughts you must or might want to express. I am inspired by what Alison has done with her own blog and she is becoming a contributor to this project as well. A while back when I wrote about the movie Maurice she wrote an entire blog about the impact the film had on her. Here is her connection so you can see how I would like this to work. Of course we do have to be careful and mindful of copyright infringement, but most of us own the copyright on the things we create.
Category Archives: Art
Elements Of Design
It’s so beautiful out already this morning; the leaves on my giant willow trees in the back yard are beginning to yellow and slowly falling creating a carpet of yellow along the ditch banks. I see the skies begin to clear with some patches of blue. If the sun comes out it’s going to create a brilliant glow that will radiate through out the house. This would be a perfect morning for some beautiful photographs, but I have no one lined up. Thor and I a have been putting so much time into the website that I we have neglected shooting anything new in the past couple of weeks. I am writing early today, even before coffee, because I want to get out and work on the yard today. I have the new deer fence about half way done on the other side of the house, so today’s goal is to get out and finish the fence and start thinking about how to design a gate. For those of you who know me, you know I don’t do anything simple and every element of my life is personally designed.
For those who have been to the studio you know exactly what I mean. The whole house is completely off center, with so many angles and pitches and textures. Everything is about function and has been created for a specific purpose. The pitch in the main room, where I shoot, was set up so that I would have beautiful natural light that would face to the north at a specific angle exposing the sky without ever allowing direct light into the actual room. With the vaulted ceilings, needing the height for lighting equipment to be raised on stands and booms, the whole pitch of the room had to be offset to thirds. See the rule of thirds I use for photography even plays into my design of the house. Because the pitch of the room is offset to the lesser third on the northern side, it creates that effect with the northern skylights. As I was designing the space, I hired a draftsman who could do the drawings of what I envisioned in my head. I defied his rules of logic and he kept moving the lines back to center. Then we hired a structural engineer who told us how to make it happen. The house is very unique and totally matches my personality. It has the balance and flow of a beautiful painting. I design from my heart and often defy what is logical, it becomes more about an expression of emotion and feelings the space evokes. My yard is becoming the same way. The fence is designed for the practical purpose of keeping the deer out, but allowing the small critters that inhabit the yard like my kitties a freedom and flexibility to move through it, and since one of them is deaf, a quick escape from dogs that come upon her unaware. The yard is small so it needs to have a feeling of being open and not restricted. The fence is becoming like these beautiful little trellises that I will also be able to plant and grow climbing flowering vines. And the rough-cut cedar gives it a weight and texture. This year was about creating a rough outline of the garden, next year will be about sculpting it. So since I have no models lined up for this beautiful Sunday morning I am heading out the garden to enjoy another fall day.
Our Perceived Remembrance of Things Past
Glenn and Forest didn’t arrive back in Missoula until about 11:00 last night. It was so good to have him home again. It’s amazing the things we for get about each other after such an absence. I think in may ways we always think of the people we love by the way we remember meeting them, thinner, younger, so filled with passion and energy. We remember that look in their eye and the way they first look at us those first couple of weeks when we fall in love. Perhaps this is just life in general. A remembrance of our mothers, fathers, brothers, and other people who become important in our lives. I think sometimes we don’t really see the people who what they actually are and just project the impression we want to believe or remember about them. My mother passed away about 6 years ago from a prolonged illness of self-abuse and smoking. She died fairly young, and when she passed she looked like a very old woman, most people would have guessed twenty years beyond her actual age. I ran across a file of images of her in those later years and I barely recognized her. It’s not what I remember. I feel fortunate because my mother was wonderful in my youth and gave us so much love, and yes often to the point of suffocation as a teen. I always thought my mother looked so much like Ingrid Bergman, with such a lovely warm personality and my father like a very young Charles Heston. So we are the offspring that what those two’s love children would have looked like if they had gotten together. I digress. Needless to say I had a strange night and tossing and turning getting used to new stranger in my bed. He was so tired he fell asleep instantly and snoring commenced, I don’t ever really remember snoring before. But this morning was bliss as I had the warmth of his soft body snuggled against me and all those old feelings came flooding back and I realized this was really what I missed the most. His smile as he looked over at me and said “Good Morning Sunshine” as he has done for the past fourteen years and I knew he was finally home. Today’s image is of Glenn, I searched all day to use for yesterday and finally found it this morning.
I love this quote from the opening of Tennessee Williams play The Glass Menagerie:
“The scene is memory and therefore nonrealistic. Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic”
I guess you could say most of my imagery is therefore rather dim and poetic for I know it is seated predominantly in my heart.
The Long Road Home
Glenn returns home tonight after working in North Dakota for the past six weeks. I am very excited to see him. It has been a terrible month of barely being able to communicate because there seems to be a lack of cell towers and he has had very poor internet service if any. This has been an annual job for him for the past couple of years to go and test the soil where the seed potatoes are grown to certify them for export to Canada. But it is good to have him home. I think sometimes it’s healthy for relationships to have long breaks from each other and always seems to realign where we are and how strong our relationship has grown on the past 14 years we have been together. It seems when you have been in a relationship with someone this long, some of the spark begins to fray around the edges and you begin to take each other for granted. He always does so much to keep me on target and focused. Taking care of a lot of the detail stuff like shopping and making sure we are fed. I am a person that is very project driven and have always got to have something I am working on at every moment of the day. I got a lot done while he was gone, though the website is not up yet it is nearing completion and I feel like I have created something extraordinary in his absence that he hasn’t even seen it yet. So I am totally jacked to see his reaction to the project. I was my goal to have the site up and running upon his return, but after about 3 weeks of technical difficulties we are in good shape.
Glenn is an adorable man, who is kind, quirky funny, like myself, and seems to be solid at the core. I have not written about him much because I had promised that I would not bring him into the process except on rare occasion, and out of respect wanted to protect his privacy, though he has been a huge component in my success and allowing me freedom and flexibility to get this dream up and out there this year. In all the years we have been together I cannot remember a single fight, barely an argument. We are the exact opposite of each other, and I think all the opposition somehow brings up together as a more stable whole. We are both of the same era and the same at our cores. We recognized this early and it’s what brought us together so closely in the beginning. I would say I used to think Glenn was the perfect Taoist. All knowing, all accepting, all giving, and all caring, a balance of all the great things in the world, yet completely unaware of it, not naming or even knowing the essence and harmony of his existence. He is somehow the embodiment of the Tao Te Ching without even knowing and possibly never even hearing of it. There is always harmony and balance that surrounds him all the time.
I have been through many relationships in my life, most of them quite tumultuous and often ending in a bitter sadness. It somehow feels to me with Glenn, he allows me to become my best and brings out the best I have to offer. I believe relationships are basically about ourselves and how we find balance with others whom we choose to share our lives. If we are not content with ourselves first, all becomes chaos and confusion and doubt. How we can become the best without fear, anxiety, or pressure? As a creative soul I learned this early. Thank you Glenn for allowing me to become the best I can possibly be and welcome home, the kitties and I have missed you.
Drawn Into the Darkness
In younger days I was drawn into darkness and often found myself lurking in shadows that were unsavory to others and probably not always safe for myself. Being a boy from Montana we do not always perceive dangers that others may be aware of within their surroundings, making us fearless. Being a stranger we may not always be aware of what the rules are and what is normal. Everything in Montana seems safe, unless you have a run away tractor barreling toward you because the diver has passed out at the wheel. I have spent a great deal of time in large cities and have only felt a threat a couple of times in my life. I spent a year in Washington DC working as a bartender for a club in the Dupont Circle area, had a roommate who was a porn actor, we did a lot of drugs and become party animals, some times to the point where I was not even sure how I even got home. In fact waking up one morning, my ankles sore and swollen to discover I had somehow ended up with a pair of pumps at the foot of my bed, I must have traded shoes, the previous night either with a drag queen or a woman with very large feet. I had always heard Washington was a somewhat dangerous town and had known people that were bashed, some of them quite severely, which in those days was quite often. As a bartender with a porno housemate, we become a privileged sort of celebrities who were recognized and often given a certain amount of advantage, in the form of little packets of treats slipped into our pockets. We were creatures of the nights, going to bed as the sun rose, sleeping all day. But I never felt a threat when I was out, even when I got stupid silly messed up. I had a good group of friends and we all kind of watched each other’s backs.
Yet I was always drawn to the darkness. There is beauty at night that becomes extraordinary; that most people do not always see. In photography it becomes very vibrant when it rains or is wet. That’s why you often see wet streets in movies shot at night, yes, even in Los Angels when it doesn’t rain, or not very often, because it makes the details in the lights pop. That beauty seems to become more pronounced in bad neighborhoods with a lot of structurally interesting textures, like alleys and areas of old abandon warehouses at night, like the meat-packing district in NYC. I am always a person who is keenly aware of my surroundings; I think this is another Montana thing that we develop a fascination with everything around us. So at night these areas awaken a feeling that I always love to explore. It becomes about who I am in the space or even possibly channeling past lives, who knows. But in cities these are typically the areas one always tries to avoid, yet these are the areas I like to linger. I tend to think I have a strong masculine presence that most people don’t really want to mess around with. I am very confrontational when I meet others and think I have a focus that sends a clear signal that I can hold my own if you come up against me. My observation skill keep me aware of what is happening around me so I don’t become an open target and can divert things before they can happen. But it is these areas that most excite and attract me.
In looking at my catalog for the website I see this feeling of lurking in darkness present in most of my images. It’s what makes it theatrical and heightens our wonder and curiosity about the subjects. I love the shadows and seeing things emerging from those shadows.
