Are you getting tired of hearing about the website yet??? It’s all I can think about anymore and seems to consume my every thought. The process is as frustrating as it is exhilarating. I am not a techno geek and am more of a goal-oriented guy so when I hit a block, become very frustrated. There are so many settings and possibilities for options that I just don’t grasp and I can waste hours on one thing that turns out to be so simple. Julian who helped us set up the system seems to have abandoned us and we are left to flounder as we learn and try to figure it out. On the other side, we are making major leaps every day. We are finally loading the galleries today and I think the overall look and functionality if very impressive.
The fun part is that I have continued shooting through out this web process and had two shoots the other day, both vastly different, which means I had to reconfigure the set up and lighting scheme for the studio. The studio just seems to become a hubbub of activity constantly now. The shooting is becoming more focused as I now have a cleaner vision of what I want and need. I have been mostly working with subjects I have worked with in the past, so it’s easier to jump right in and get going. I am still maintaining and need to keep my focus on the original integrity of where I began this process and have not deviated from that, but the images are improving with each session and subsequent shoot.
Many years ago I only dreamed of being in a place like this and now here I am in the middle of it all and things are coming together. Having the assistants is making a huge difference in how I create. It’s actually allowing me to focus on my process as they work through so much of the detail and I get to jump in and oversee it for maintaining the artistic integrity.
Don’t worry I will be back to some of my interesting stories soon, once we get this thing rolling and I can begin to focus on other things.
I watched an interesting movie yesterday while I was moping about, called Séraphine. It was a French movie about an average woman, leading a life of hardships, doing whatever jobs possible in 1927 France and who had a passion for painting. She thought she was given a blessing by god that pushed her to follow her gifts. She did not really understand why or where the divine inspiration actually came from, but was compelled to paint at whatever the cost. She was a middle-aged woman, older than myself, living in a place and time of poverty. Yet she found the greatest joy in nature and collected items from her environment to temper and color her paint, blood from a cow liver, mud from a creek, flowering plants by the roadside. She brought these elements into her small one room living space and spent the nights grinding these items into her paints, then created amazing images of that nature in vivid almost childlike impressions. The woman who played Séraphine Louis (Yolande Moreau) was mesmerizing at bringing such honesty and truth to the character. In the end she is discovered as an old lady. The success drove her mad, and she spends her last 10 years in an asylum, disconnected from nature and painting as her imagery becomes legendary.
I have spent this weekend in contact with John Douglas in Australia coming up with a plan or an idea to begin a new social network based on male nude or erotic art. He was the original founder of a site called Man Art, which is where I first began to show my images a year ago May and really what has lead me to here. Followers of the Blog will remember that Man Art was shut down last spring due to censorship issues on the server hosting it. Men on the Verge of a Pornographic Extinction I am now working with a Webmaster who has his own server and the whole thing has become private so there should be no possibility of censorship. It seems the distinction between pornography and art is often blurred. But to the people creating it, the ability to express one’s self, those lines are quite clear. And sure sometimes we push those boundaries, but that’s what a true exploration of artistic expression is. If we did the same things all the time it would become boring and our work stagnate. As artist we need to constantly be challenging our selves and the way we examine our existence. And to have that social network in one common place where we can interact and feed each other is essential. For many years I worked in a hidden world. I knew what it was I wanted to do, but creating such art in a place like Montana was totally unacceptable and still taboo. But in all honest the naked male form is still taboo in most parts of the world. It’s funny that a man taking his cloths off in a football stadium faces sieve legal action while everywhere I wandered in Paris I saw open displays of statuary of full frontal exposed male nudity in most every public park. Unfortunately the private parts have been chiseled off some of the most remarkable pieces by various religions through out history that found that item of the male anatomy unacceptable. But gazing at the remarkable beauty of those statues where those bits still remained in tact it really doesn’t become the focus of the art. It actually has the opposite effect, because we are more drawn to what was removed. After centuries of growth and enlightenment we live in a world where people are still trying to dismember the penis. For god’s sake it’s a part of who we are, half of the world has a penis. I digress.
This morning when I looked on Manhunt, as I do every morning to peruse the personals in quest of new subjects for my photo experiments, I saw a name that actually intrigued me: Soul seeker. Of course I had to respond: “Soul Seeker – Interesting thought, that might make you either a god or a devil, searching for lost souls in a sometimes seemingly soulless environment; like a decent into a modern Dante’s Inferno. It’s really a brilliant concept.” He is a 32 year old, Top/Versatile Male that is 6”0 with a swimmers body, light brown wavy hair and a devilish glean in his blue eyes that has been taken in a multi impression mirror, so we can see the duality of his expression. My mind began spinning amazing thoughts about the possibility of the concept of a devil/angle searching for our lost souls in a man hunting site that has become a dream like world mostly plastered with impressionistic images of cocks, ass and mostly naked bodies seeking sex and quick hookups and an occasional long term relationship. WOW! What a perfect place for such a person to dwell where they can easily claim those souls, many seemingly lost; drifting, waiting, anticipating, on the edge of a dark desire that will either fulfill or consume them. For the most part they are looking to be consumed. This is beginning to sound a lot like a Tennessee Williams play or a short movie, or a study for a new photographic series. “All hope abandon, ye who enter in!” Why does this world of cruising men seem to always have such a dark edge? It is a delicious reverie of the flesh, a mysterious glimpse of a shadow in the darkness, most of them blurred, just a little beyond focus where we get a vague impression, but not sharp enough to contain any hints of reality. Abs are hyper extended, bodies contorted into complex unnatural poses, taken sometime from even more unusual positions. I am captivated and often envious that what I work so hard to create, can become genius at the hands of a skillful cell phone. Light setting in the wrong position creating equally as interesting color casts, that add a garish tone to the overall feel of the image. A skillfully placed strobe to obscure the face, adds to the soulless nature of the headless bodies. It’s like we are all trying to hide something, perhaps our insecurities and yet reveal something someone else might see in us and desire. I sometimes gaze in awe of the brilliance of these images, reading the brief snippets they project out to us and often ponder, who is this person, really. It fascinated me to no end. And I wonder if perhaps if I am not the soul seeker, that devil also trying to steal some of these lost souls. But often the subjects I have culled from these depths and brought into my studio to illuminate redeemed that self respect and dignity they often can’t see within themselves. This is where my imagery becomes it’s most powerful and provocative, restoring all these sorted bits into a distinguishable whole that is pure, healthy and vital. I have often thought it would be interesting to show a collection of these internet images. Printed, matted, framed and hung in a gallery where we could admiringly peer into the depths of these wondrous visions. The art of self selling one’s own sex is often for more interesting then what we give it credit for on the surface.
I began to realize yesterday what a dream life I have. I am creating and living in a fantasy world that many people only dare dream to enter. Though some of the imagery may not always be that interesting, it is the process of creating it and the connection to the subjects that is really the fascinating part of this type of work. Since my regular work schedule has now shifted from mid afternoon to early evening, I am having to shift my shooting schedule to later evenings. There is something about shooting in a dark studio that becomes seductive and alluring. I mostly use a strobe system that over powers all light so it does not matter if I am shooting in a studio filled with daylight or at night only using the modeling lights from the strobes. I know the effect and how the light works so well, that I can perfect it without even seeing the actual results on the subject. But at night when the subjects are surrounded by darkness and they can only see themselves in the mirror across the room in the beautiful light I have bathed them in, something magical begins to emerge from their personalities as their inhibitions begin to drop. I tend to choose music that many people do not know, that has a hypnotic quality to it that allows the subjects to become lost and delve deeper within themselves. When the subject looks away and becomes unaware of my presence in the space and lets go of themselves these become moments I really look to capture.
