Now that the weather has suddenly turned nice, my focus is drawn outside. It is becoming more and more difficult to do things inside. Part of my downfall as a photographic artist is that in the summer my focus tends to shift toward landscape projects and that I have so little time to work on my art work. I have not hit the point yet were I am actually making any money as an artist and therefore have to rely on other sources of income to sustain myself. The advantage is that I am very passionate about working in landscape and it also allows me to stock up a financial reserve that allows for creative winter months when I am shut inside. Today I am going to attempt to find a balance between both. I am going to spend this morning working outside and the afternoon on photography. I have a model coming at 2 and we will work on some new images. The older I get the harder it becomes to leap from one thing to another and maintain the balance. Now I have added this blog into my morning mix. Ideally at this point in my life I would like to begin to focus on just one thing. In my heart that is the photography of half naked men. It is the thing I am most passionate about. I have put all of my energies and effort into it for the past 4 and a half months and it still hasn’t quite taken off yet. I am not making any money off of any of it. I am beginning to realize that perhaps the things we are most passionate about are not the things that can sustain us. Perhaps they should be just left as passions that we merely dabble in. Lucky I am passionate about other things that can make money on.

Last night I finally arranged to jump from the plane. It is scheduled for the morning after the party and the day before my birthday. I found it a little odd when they said they only take cash before the event. I suppose if all doesn’t go well, there is no recourse for payment if you don’t survive, LOL. The excitement and terror pulsed through my body, my mind, and my heart was racing a bit just making the appointment. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like the day of the event.

I have two fears remaining in my life that I have yet to confront; one is fear of water and drowning, which I am not sure how to confront, the other is a fear of falling. I was always the kid that could not jump off the bridge when swimming in river in the summer, but that of course are two of my greatest phobias combined. And I don’t know why all of a sudden I feel compelled to make this happen. I guess I am expecting some kind of liberation in my head with the actual exiting of the plane. Who knows I may be like one of those cats with arms outstretched clawing into whatever desperate last attempts to not go; I’m hoping for a little more dignity then that. And it is the exiting the plane that will become the problem for me, the actual fall I don’t think will be the issue. The event will take place at 11:00 on May 22 in Ronan, Montana. There are still seats available if anyone wants to join. I talked to my brother Mark immediately after I made the appointment to see if he was interested. His reply was “GOD NO, I have no desire to jump out of a plane.” (His birthday is the day after mine.) A friend Justin came by this morning and said he did it for his 18th birthday and it was a turning point in his life. He was able to face a lot of fears and gave him a boldness toward making decisions at that point in his life. I am hoping it will do the same for me.

This has been the year for great leaps in my life. To finally put myself out there and say this is who I am has been liberating and inspiring. I have always searched for meaning in everything. To challenge myself and defy standard convention. To push my own boundaries. As the day of my 50th Birthday rapidly approaches, it feels like it’s getting easier somehow. Beginning this year, I was very fearful of the idea and of the process. I lead a somewhat reckless youth and actually never thought I would get to this age so I need to define this moment by something truly momentous and it doesn’t get any grander than this. I guess I want to be able to look back on my life and say I have done it my way with little fear, to boldly go and stare the doubts in my life in the eyes and face the truths within myself. We only get this chance once in our lives to feel the blood coursing through our veins as our hearts pump with adrenaline and we float back to the earth.

I took some time for myself all weekend. Did not have anything scheduled and just tried to stay at the studio and catch up with myself. It feels like my life has been running at a break neck pace for the past month without a single day off. I need to stop doing this to myself and take more breaks. It feels like I am either swamped with work or completely dead and hardly ever just a nice steady pace. The stress has been creeping into my muscles and it was time to stop. Saturday was an extraordinary beautiful day, mostly because we have had such a long winter and the nice days are so rare lately that a day with sun feels like a holiday. I spent the entire day out working in my gardens. My studio is a very unique landscape space that I have been working to develop for some time. It is built into the side of a hill and has an old irrigation ditch that runs though it in the summers that I have landscaped to look like a creek. Something special about me is my passion for the outdoors and my ability to work in nature to create interesting landscaped spaces. Being outside is where I absolutely feel the best and most of my summers are dedicated to working on and developing garden spaces. But this studio space is extraordinary. I am particularly having a blast working on it because it is my own space. I generally work for others and so rarely get to work on my own space. Last year I put some major things in but didn’t get to involved because the ground was still settling from the construction from the previous spring and I didn’t want to work too much around the house until I knew what I had to work with.

My project on Saturday was in the front driveway where I am building a little rock wall at the edge of my driveway to contain a little edge of garden along the fence line. With the changes of elevation on the property, it all begins to slope down toward the street to the west so it makes for some very interesting challenges. Many years ago before I owned this property and worked for Gilbert, I planted a bank of virginia creeper along the fence line, which was mostly over grown with weeds. Then a couple of years ago, most of it was ripped out by the heavy equipment doing construction of the new studio, but right next to the fence these old creepers survived. Last year I began to cultivate them again and they flourished and created a beautiful summer hedge of big green leaves. So it’s the base of these I am trying to protect with the little rock wall so I can better feed and nurture them. The valley we live was once known as Glacial Lake Missoula, a massive lake at one time, so the ground is fertile and filled with large beautiful river rocks. Everywhere I dig I run into these rocks and so it is these rocks that have become a major part of my landscaping elements. I toiled all day digging and placing these rocks in to my wall formations, many of them too big to almost move by myself.

So what does this have to do with Naked Men? Nothing. Like I said it was a day off. Today is another day of rain, but somehow getting outside this past weekend and toiling has recharged me. It feels like I am finally caught up and spent all morning trying to reconnect with the people I have lost touch with over the past month. It’s time to get back into the studio and work on naked men. Being outside has brought me back to my center and am now inspired to create some new projects. This is the time of the year when I can garden in the mornings and photograph all afternoon. It’s a perfect balance of perfection.

I had the most tumultuous relationship with my mother and I never quite understood the dynamics that bound us. Yes, she did give birth to me and I was her first child. I was conceived while she was in high school while she was 17. I am sure unplanned, but certainly not unwanted. She marred my father the following winter and I was born in the spring. Subsequently she didn’t finish school and I suspect I was always to blame. My mother and father never talked about their meeting and how they eventually got together and I always had a feeling that my conception some how forced them together. I know they did love each other and remained married until she passed away 6 years ago.

My mother had grown up in a dysfunctional world. Her mother had a lot of emotional and mental problems, drank a lot, ended up in and out of mental hospitals, and had sexual addiction issues. My mother told me stories of how her mother always had lots of different men and how my mother was abandoned for long periods of time to go off on her binge drinking. She also told me stories about how her mother had tried to kill them several times when she would sink into deep depressions. This I believed created a lot of insecurities for my mother and she lived the rest of her life, even with us, in fear of rejections and being abandoned. She clung so tight to all of us that we felt we were being strangled. I always resented her co-dependence on all of us. She never learned to drive and constantly needed to have someone to take care of her. She had no independence and this was her security. As a gay man growing up my greatest fears were that I would fall into that pattern; I resisted it and I resented it. I feel like so much of my struggle to become the opposite of everything she represented.

Everyone said I was her greatest pride and joy and that her life revolved around me. As a child I adored this and my mother was ever inventive in the creation of my happiness. She would spend days working on the most creative cakes for our birthdays and showered us with affection. But as I began to get older and gain my own independence that adoration turned to an overbearing constraint that created great animosity for me. She began to drink heavily and soon it began to consume her. She didn’t take care of herself. As she searched for her own independence, she became lost in an unhealthy spiral that lead to a whole host of health issues that began to devastate her well being physically and mentally. She took an abundance of harmful medications that led to other health issues and soon life became a struggle to survive. She aged years before my eyes to the point that I could no longer recognize her. As much as I pleaded and tried to help, she was resistant. My angst over her self-abusive nature drove me further away from her and we become strangers; something we both grew to resent. I could not release this resentment that her ill health became her crutch and reason for existence.

When my mother passed, I didn’t feel any emotions. I guess I become accustomed to her barrage of unhealthy living and illness and that it was a blessing and a relief that she had passed from her pain and misery. A few weeks later the little boy buried deep in me began to feel the pain of her loss, and one rainy day as I was working in my studio I began to explore this loss in an image. It was the first time I was finally able to connect an emotion to my own creation and I became captivated by the beauty for a life you had given up to give me. Today’s picture is dedicated to my mother. I still have this image hanging in my studio and it reminds me of you.

Today I am haunted by my memories of you. I now see your smile, your warmth, your tender heart that only meant to protect me from the horrors of a live you had lived. I know I was so hard and judgmental on you mother most of my life when I know you only loved me. Today I am ever grateful that you given me this life and that I should find such strength in your weakness. I know you were proud of me and still feel your warmth embrace me even though you are no longer around. Thank you mother for given me such a wonderful life and for instilling such a passion in my life to become myself.

I have recently upgraded to the newest version of Adobe Photoshop CS5 and have been doing a training course on its full range of capabilities. First of all let me preface this with I have been a Photoshop user for a very long time since some of it’s earliest incarnations and have steadily grown with all their advancements. It has been a while since I have done an upgrade stopping along CS2. It got to be a point were the new versions were not really much of an advancement. But to make the leap from 2 to 5 seems to be a complete redesign that warranted me to buy into a 21-hour training program. Granted the program has become easier to access and run and has a whole new slew of tools, but somehow after looking at the introduction it seems the once powerful and creative software has become a major fix-all program for bad photographers. It seems that it’s taking the creative ingenuity that photography is based on and now sending out the message it’s OK to create bad images, we can now help you simply fix your inability to take great pictures. I guess what’s more disturbing is that with the hefty price tag this bag of tricks is aimed at the professional photographer. Suddenly you can remove people from beautiful landscapes as if they never existed, circle, highlight, and at the click of a button it automatically matches the surrounding pixels and the original image is altered forever.

To me this concept of total alteration of the image begs to answer the question is the art of photography becoming extinct? Do we no longer have to worry about exposure? Have composition and the beauty of creation become passé? It seems the skill and the artistry that originally drew me to photography as an art form is slowly losing its magical allure. I began in the era of film and processing and printing by hand. Becoming infused with the image as one, emerging on a white piece of paper in the wet darkness. Granted I embraced the digital medium, and think it has made my work flow faster, but I still am enamored with the process of creation of thought of balance of harmony. I worked to create the images I wanted and the images become a part of my own sense of inner satisfaction. It’s what sets us apart as craftsmen. So the real question is if we are not confronted by the artistry of what we are doing, does it constitute art or does it become a mistrewn mess of maladjusted pixels that represents art. Do we give up on the actual creative process when mediocre is acceptable? I don’t know what the answer is anymore. I look at so many photographers’ websites that create such uninteresting images because the only interesting thing in them is the manipulation? Yes I know ultimately it is about choice, but we really can’t learn and grow from our mistakes if we are merely taught that everything is fixable because we choose to be lazy or sloppy in what brings us to the medium from the start. Creative choice is a powerful tool when we wield it wisely and are forced to be confronted by the choices we make. Perhaps I am just getting old, though I do embrace the modern technology. I just question its end result. I guess it’s ultimately about creative choice no mater how you approach it. Looking back this is probably what the painters during the second half of the 1800’s were saying as Georges-Pierre Seurat was developing his style of impressionism.