I am strongly becoming empowered by other artists’ images.  I have been working with several other artists from around the world who have submitted images and writings that I have been creating galleries of for this project.  It means spending a great deal of time with each image to build page by page and the more I study others work and talk to them the more I somehow become connected to their worlds.  There is such strength in the impression they impart on their works no matter the style of medium they work.  Each piece needs to be studied individually to really understand its power.  In many ways it’s unfortunate to show such a large body of work because it forces us to skim through it as a collection without really paying attention to the detail.  Where as each piece is a single moment suspended in time, which has often taken hours, days, some times even months to create.  I am beginning to realize the images should be looked at individually.  Unfortunately, we live in a world where we are inundated with so much imagery that we often just spend a few moments working our way through the vastness of it all.  In olden days, images were hung on a wall of a gallery, museum, or salon and you were forced to interact and respond to the pieces that hung before you and when something really caught your eye you could linger and try to unravel it’s mysterious influence.  I don’t think this happens so much anymore.  We may bookmark or download an image and it becomes part of a vast collection, we may never even get back to again, because there is something new to see.  And often times when we do go back and look at an image it will not have the same impact it had in the first place because we have changed and now see it from another perspective.  But if we linger long enough, the power of the artists’ vision begins to take hold and influences the way we see ourselves and our own sense of our own creation and we see the artist as a mirror to ourselves.  In the 1972 version of the film “Cabaret” the director Bob Fosse borrowed an idea from the original script in which the play ends by dropping a large mirror down so the audience can literally see the reflection of themselves revealing and asking us to examine the judgmental racism of Nazi Germany within ourselves.  It is a powerful moment of the show.  Though it doesn’t quite work on film the mirror is still there and becomes a reflection turning our focus inward.  Art dealing with the still taboo subject of male nudity still has that impact and I am delighted to be and adoringly enamored to the be the in company of such amazing talents.