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.
Category Archives: Personal
Into the Wild
I am writing this morning from a remote cabin at 57,000 on top of a mountain in Northern Idaho. Glenn had been planning this weekend for months and I said once I got the website up I would go. We took the weekend off and come over to visit our friends Forrest and Beth and their black lab Sprocket in a small mining town called Mullan, just over the mountains and the Montana-Idaho border. We then proceeded to a cabin in the mountains miles above Wallace. Their place is very rustic and I was not sure that we would even make it to the destination. The higher we went the deeper the snow got until we reached the cabin and the snow level was about a foot deep. The cabin, more a pole lodge, so far is only covered by exterior sheeting and was very raw within. It has a little wood stove in the center of the room that we instantly fired up and within a half hour could no longer see our breaths. I put a pot on the stove and made a hearty chicken stew with carrots, potatoes, and mushrooms flavored with tarragon, a pinch of basil, and rosemary. It turned out fantastic for my first time of cooking an old fashioned wood stove.
We ate, drank, and chatted and watched the world around us envelop into a secluded darkness and the one gas lantern they had seem to fail us. Then we all climbed to a loft to sleep. There was a draft of snow and ice particles blowing through the cracks, which Forrest tired to seal before we went to bed. I drifted in and out of consciousness as Forrest got up throughout the night to feed the fire. At one point that fire had gone out and I hunkered deeper into my bed, snuggling closer to Glenn for warmth as a draft that felt good when I first went to bed now chilled the core of my body. In the wilderness the night seems eternal as I kept waking up looking for some signs of daylight. The morning came early gradually illuminating the outline of the open rafters barley above my head.
I was the first one up because I wanted to watch how the light began to fill the valleys far below us. As rustic as it all seemed it really awoke a side of myself I have completely forgotten. It reminded me of my youth and growing up on the ranch. It feels like the ongoing theme of this week has been a return to simplicity and a greater connection to my natural heritage. Although the website is a culmination of my existence, it is my connection to the future as I move into the future. Today I am stripped on all the essentials of a modern life, no running water, no electricity, dependent on the life my computer laptop battery, now running in the red. Here we are against our own elements. There is something poetic about the sound of the snow smattering against the side of the building, of not working from the moment I rise to well after midnight each night. We must exist only within the expanse of the natural day.
Looking for the Catch Light in Their Eyes
Yesterday I began a discussion about analyzing light in a photograph to use it to your advantage. The discussion began with my looking at a book of rare vintage nudes from the 60’s. And there was a prime example of what I wanted to talk about in one of the images but I can find a decent enough image of it online to show my examples so I am going to take this image of Travis. It’s harder to do on an image that I already know and have created. To me my own lighting techniques are so simplistic that they are hard to describe but here goes. My concept for the image was to show a gritty dirty mechanic sort of guy who had been working in a shop possibly most of his life. Growing up in small towns in Montana there are guys I know well and in high school I was particularly drawn to one kid who really exited me. He was a smart kid from a poorer family and work to help supplement and support his family. I watched him struggle most of the time and often worked instead of having fun with some of the rest of us his own age. He had an alliance to duty and I felt he often felt trapped in that world longing to be out from under its burden. He always seemed to live in a very fractured world. Yet there was something sexy and sensual in his honesty and how humble his work in the garage became. Every time I would visit he would just dirty in his coveralls, grime smeared across his face. The smell of the grease and mechanic dirt somehow become intoxicating to me and I found a strong desire to somehow be closer to him and somehow ease his fractured world.
I used Travis as me subject for this study because he so much reminded me of the person I used to know. So now that you know the history of the image I want you to begin looking that the image and analyze to see if I have indeed captured the properties of my intent tough the use of light. Typically I do this with images I don’t know the story behind and try to discover the artist’s connection to the subject though their use of light and exposure. The first thing I look at is the overall feel of the image. What does it stir or evoke within myself? There is a distance yet longing with in his eyes and a power and a strength in his hands that embrace the chain the bind him around his neck with a sort of comfort while he stands back, distant, yet there is a longing in his bloodshot eyes to connect to something different. Once you have established the over all mood, you must search the image for what supports that feeling. How does the light impact the psychology of the image? How many lights did the photographer use and where were they placed. The first place to begin to look for how a photographer uses light is to look at the catch light in the subject’s eyes. If you can zoom in close it will give you a lot of detail what the shape of the light was and where it was placed. On Travis you will see I used two lights in the front one a very long narrow light with a soft filter almost straight out in front, slightly to the right. You will also see just a faint small secondary light to the left that fills in the shadows on the left side of his face. This is what captures the longing in his eyes. I then used two very strong lights one to the left, not very high to sculpt the right side and a secondary light with little filter over his left shoulder. These are slightly behind him because I wanted there to be shadows on his face that represented and fractured light coming from different angels across his face, enhancing him being pulled in different directions accentuation his own fractured world. To discover the placement of these lights you look at where the highlights hit and the shadows fall. You see dappled patches of highlights across his face that mirrors the dappled grime on his face. Look at how the shadows fall on the veins of his hands and try to visualize where the light would need to be outside of the image to create such an effect. Then the image is slightly underexposed to give it a pervasive darkness that was really the mood I remember about this kid.
I can spend hours and hours looking at photographs trying to analyze the intensity of their felling. I think many photographers once they learn the tools of their craft subliminally allow those powerful tools to work for them. We don’t really have the time to necessarily analyze the image as we are taking them, but all we have ever learned just instinctively comes into play.
Though my thoughts of this boy go back to when we were both 16, nothing developed between us, just a remarkable friendship, but I still remember that longing to become a part of his world; to somehow linger beside him. He ended up marring my best friend and entered a world of greater joy that I had never seen within him before. He finally seemed content. Years later I heard of his passing, probable suicide, and a sickness filled the pit of my stomach. I know I have become a success with this image, when I gaze deep into Travis’ eyes and am haunted by the memory of our faded youth.
The Sense Memory of a Garden
Most of yesterday was spent cleaning out the garden. It’s the final winterizing of the plants for the season. I put my headphones on and listened to a couple of my favorite musicals and began to pull the annuals, cut perennials, and mound roots of things that need protection. This will be my last garden post for the season. The garden becomes my place of reflection and I typically delve deeper into my emotions and feelings when I am surrounded by its grace. I have not always loved gardening, as a kid on the ranch we had an acre that was mostly vegetables and potatoes and it seemed more of a chore to maintain. In those days we completely lived off the land, canned or stored everything in a root cellar to last until the next harvest. We raised and butchered our own cattle and all the men in my family, except me were hunters always filling the freezers with meat. The ranch was sustained by a natural water spring about a mile up the mountain that we piped down the homestead. Life seemed so simple then. But as a kid I think life always seems simple no matter where you grow up. Yesterday, as I cleaned the garden, I began to realize how connected I have always been with the land around me, just as my father, grandfather, and great grandfather who homesteaded the land were connected. I once had a friend in Dallas who talked about how the people from Montana have a certain look in their eyes that was recognizable, that was different from everyone else. I hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time, but have thought about it a lot since then. Becoming a photographer and creating portraits you become keenly aware of other peoples focus. What I began to realize, that look my friend was talking about was the openness of one´s eyes to see beyond ourselves. In Montana we grow up with our vision focused on the beautiful landscape that surrounds us, the mountains always become a point of focus in the distance. Whereas, when I go to a city like New York, the focus becomes narrow, downward, avoiding, protecting our personal space. In Montana we perceive the entire world is our personal space. This focus changes depending on whatever environment which you are raised. For me working in the earth grounds me and brings me back to center. I have been focused for so long on something so narrow, upfront, personal and close to my heart, that I almost feel like I forget to breathe. But working in the garden gives me perspective of where I have been as I am flooded with all my memories from all my previous seasons of the garden. The garden holds our sense memory within our bodies as often as repeating a task stirs a reoccurrence of a thought associated with that task from before. Several years ago I was diagnosed with cancer and underwent a summer of chemotherapy, though I didn’t have the energy that summer to garden much, I did make it out every day. I was the only way I survived that summer from hell. It is the place where I dare to dream in the solitude of my own head. As a kid I loved digging the mounds of potatoes in the cool fall, there was something satisfying about pulling from that dirty earth something that would sustain you for a year. So the Fall seasons for me, though they represent the earth becoming dormant, signify the bounty of sustainability for a new year. I realize I am a man of many opposites and perhaps this is what I love so much about the process of a garden. Granted, I no longer work the earth to sustain myself and buy most of my produce in the supermarkets, but the idealism of this life is still there and lives within my own hands. At least with the land I know where I stand and to which I will eventually be returned. My thoughts this Fall were on my accomplishments this year and how much I have grown and changed as I realize this has been my greatest year of self-acceptance.
With A Little Help From My Friends…
It has been about two and a half months since I returned from my inspirational trip to France and Germany and have since accomplished the goal I set out to do. This morning I have began reconnecting to some of my Man Art and Red Bubble friends and approaching them on the possibility of building a gallery of their magnificent works that could become featured artist on the new site. It feels that I have been in a creative hole since my return from the trip that I have lost touch with all my creative artist friends that are also exploring the nude male form. Hopefully you will begin to see new galleries of their work begin to populate the new website and it will finally begin to grow. Not that I don’t have enough work of my own to do because I still have 32 of my own galleries that we have created, but not had the time to put up yet. The site will continue to grow in the upcoming weeks. I am still trying to figure out some of it operational features and placement and links to the home page. And, I have been trying to take some time off and get caught up with my own life. But perhaps, this is my life. Not a bad life at that if so. The gardens are about to bed for the winter and this seems like an excellent way to spend my winter, stuck indoors working on this vision. Today I have to say thanks to Franz Werner in Berlin, who is one of the most inspirational people who have given me the idea for making this project happen. I have never seen a man so passionate and dedicating so much of his life to showing the modern male erotic form.
If you are interested in contributing to the website here are the requirements. You can link to your own website or to places where the images are for sale, for instance back to Red Bubble or if you sell them yourself. The site is protected, as much as such sites can be protected, and I will be able to put a watermark overlay on the image. We are looking for image sizes 600dpi at it’s longest point 100 dpi resolution roughly 100kb. Please contact me if you are interested in becoming a featured artist on the site.
“What would you think if I sang out of tune,
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song
And I’ll try not to sing out of key.
Oh, I get by with a little help from my friends
Mm, I get high with a little help from my friends
Mm, gonna try with a little help from my friends”
Lyrics from “With a little help from my friends” as sung by Joe Cocker originally written by the Beatles.
