Today will mark 100,000 visitors to this Naked Man Project Blog since it began the beginning of January earlier this year.  I had turned off the counter to exclude myself and had set up spam filtration not to inflate the numbers.  This total is the two blogs combined since I have still continued the original blog on Blogger because there seems to be a lot of foreign visitors who are using translators on that site.  Recently there have been about 500 followers per day.  I am a bit awestruck to reach such a number and I am honored that so many people have followed this project.  Many of you have become friends on my Facebook page and I am amazed by the diversity of people who have connected to me over the year.

I feel a lot of emotions beginning to overwhelm me now that I am in the final week of the project.  I now have models that are becoming reluctant to be shown in the project because it has grown so much and suddenly when their names are Googled it leads to this project and some of them are reluctant to have this much exposure, so to speak.  We are a very small community that typically is not open about such things.  And I doubt greater Missoula has much knowledge the project even exits.  I know at UPS, nobody is aware of its creation and what I have been doing, so in an odd sense it still remains a secret.  Most of my family is not on Facebook and none of them are followers either, in fact most every one that surrounds my immediate world is completely oblivious to my undertaking, or has not mentioned anything.  I feel like I should have a celebration to have accomplished this project, but there is no one around me to share that celebration.  It now exists in a strange vacuum on the Internet and I am honored to have shared it with those of you who follow it.  You see in my world the naked man is still taboo, physically and emotionally.  We are still a civilization here that becomes uncomfortable with the expose of nudity, and equally so about not expressing our feelings, personal thoughts, emotions, and especially anything to do with homosexuality.  To Montana this project is foreign and in a sense so far ahead of it’s time.  Yet we exist on the Internet, sharing our daily activities and images through all the social networking in many ways trivializing our lives for all to see.  Does everyone need to know the daily details of our existence?  I have tired to approach this project on a broader scope and tried to create a vision of my time.  Writing about issues we are all dealing with, well not all, people more like me, stuck in a places more like mine, struggling with identity, fear of creation in an absence of beauty.  We live in a turbulent time of great uncertainty where day-to-day life is still a struggle.  Where dreams begin to fade into a dreary escapism as we grow further and further from our true nature or sense of self.  Has the world always been this way or am I just now paying attention?

This year has been a tremendous amount of work and I feel weary and tired.  I have literally taken a year off with great sacrifice for its completion.  It will be good to put my focus on others aspects of my life that have been neglected through out the course of the year.  My focus now begins to turn outward toward those what surround me, but now with a greater awareness and appreciation for what I have become through the process of this evolution.

The howling wind feels, as if it is about to burst through the walls as it pelts icy rain against the window. A winter storm is raging outside, in the darkness. It is now three eighteen a.m. My blood turns to ice in my veins, listening, as I lie awake sleepless, a sickness fills the pit of my stomach, as my breath becomes shallow and I am aware of a feeling I have not felt in decades. I keep asking myself, when did I become so cold? Tonight I am reminded as a memory haunts my thoughts, of a feeling I thought I had tucked so far away that it would never be allowed to emerge again. Funny, but it takes me back to a Christmas so many years ago. I was 23 and madly in love at the time, it was my first love, something I expected to somehow last forever. I was young, gullible, and somewhat naive of the world. I believed in a heterosexual role model of Donna Reedism of finding the one you loved and sticking with them to end of time. I knew early that I had a passion to be with another man, but was too afraid to approach it. So when it finally happened, I leapt at the possibility. What began in Montana as an act of lust from my first sexual experience with a man, moved us to Dallas as an act of love to find a world less inhibited. There was turmoil from the beginning and I somehow knew in my heart it didn’t really matter, sometimes these are the things we sacrifice to be with another. It was all I ever wanted, a dream come true, and I was not about to let it slip through my fingers. We had little money and had to live in a cockroach infested motel room in a very bad neighborhood in a then seedy area of the city known as Lovers Lane. I quickly got a job in construction, working on high-rise buildings for a new city that was being constructed outside of Dallas. He was looking for a job in computers and wouldn’t compromise on anything less, so mostly drifted around the motel, waiting for a job opportunity to approach him. I soon began to realize he was infatuated with another young man, also living in the same complex, and there were times when he would disappear for hours, leaving me alone to fret and stew in the worst of thoughts, which at the time nearly drove me mad, with envy, jealousy, and rage. Eventually I scraped together enough money and got us an apartment in North Dallas. But he still couldn’t find a job. I soon began to discover that he talked in his sleep, but it only happened when the air conditioner kicked on above our bed and he talked about people he had been having sex with, which confirmed my greatest fear, often revealing those experiences in graphic detail. I was suddenly in a difficult situation between not wanting to know, because it drove me deeper into a rage, and desperate to understand what was actually going on. So I have to confess I would spend the night turning the air conditioner on and off to hear of his daily escapades. It became a maddening obsession that I was not proud of but could not let go. I became devastated, and it finally all come to a head that week between Christmas and New Years as I began to confront him. Then New Years Eve we got into a brawl in the parking lot and I knew my idealistic fantasy world had burst. I have never felt so much rage in my life, and have not since. He left me shortly thereafter for someone else. Stranded in a strange city I was never quite comfortable in the first place. Then in the middle of the night I hopped on a bus and headed back to my home in Montana leaving everything behind.

I didn’t realize at the time, but thereafter I began to build a wall around myself, determined not to get hurt again. Yes, I have had a lot of relationships, but somehow there was something always missing. Tonight, I realize it was me that has been missing all these long years. I now see when people get to close I back off or push them away. I always thought this was the way of an artist: to deny themselves emotions and express it within their work. But I was not yet an artist because I was too consumed by my fears to create. I settled and stayed with what was comfortable, often losing myself in the relationships or task at hand. Tonight has become a painful reality check for me as I see how I have insulated myself over the years. Tonight I feel that pain returning to my heart. I feel I have been loved by many but created such pain to most. This year’s reality check has maybe become more then I bargained for as I have lost something that is most dear to me tonight as I feel the repercussions of my year long focused task. Irreparable damage has been done and I must accept the consequences. Have I slipped into a dark abyss without even realizing it, because of my own selfish behaviors? Am I somehow doomed to be alone because I am an artist and need to create? I have changed so much, since those early days, but now I recognize that moment when innocence is lost and how my perception of the world changed and impaired my judgement. How is it we become so unhealthy at the moment of our greatest clarity? A hunting refrain plays through my mind and I suddenly realize a new meaning behind the immortal words of Oscar Wilde:

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.”

From the haunting and moving poem: The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

Yesterday my brother, Kelley, in Houston sent me a beautiful image that really took me back to Christmas past.  Typically all our families gathered on Christmas Eve at our old family ranch that had been homesteaded by my great grandfather in the mountains of western Montana.   All of my cousins, consisting of eight boys and one girl, would play reindeer games in the old barnyard as the darkness fell upon the mountains that surrounded us while we watched to the sky for the approach of Santa.  We would play on the old scrap metal pile where my grandfather heaped pieces from the tractors and farming equipment parts which he recycled and scavenged from throughout the cultivation season.  We build snow caves and forts in the snow banks from where the snow had been plowed at the edge of the old barnyard and licked the snowflakes that fell from the dark sky to our burning cheeks.  I loved to sing and would get all my cousins to gather in the center of the barnyard about the old concrete watering trough and sing Silent Night or Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer.  I remember feeling so happy, being filled with awe and wonder as we waited in anticipation.  Though most of the families were poor, we had no sense of want, because our families were filled with joy, just to have each other and to gather and share such times together.  We did not get much for Christmas and looking back I know my parents went to great sacrifice to give us the few things that would really delight on us on Christmas morn.  It seemed there were always a pair of footed pajamas for each of us boys, though the colors were all different they all matched.  Then we each got one gift each from Santa.  Often time mine was some sort of craft gift like Pom-Pom Pets from which I could make old looking creatures from yarn, or paint by numbers, or a new set of brightly colored markers. My brothers typically got the Tonka’s, tractors and building kits.  Somehow my parents recognized my creative nature and I somehow always ended up with something that captivated my creative spirit.  My mind raced with excitement.

Though my family no longer gets together for Christmas anymore, my father and Norma go south to Yuma, Arizona and my brothers all have their own families. But I still go out a remote ranch in those mountains in western Montana, actually not to far from where I grew up, passing our family ranch along the way to spend Christmas.  This time with my buddies from the Gay Rodeo Association.  It still becomes a Cowboy Christmas wearing boots and wranglers, delighting in great food and just sharing with close friends.  This year feels it is one of my greatest years of accomplishment.  I have everything I could ever have wanted and my heart feels content and some point in the evening I will slip out to their barnyard and gaze to the dark heavens and step back to that simple time and think what an amazing heritage I have to be in this remarkable place.

As budding artists we are often reluctant to look beyond the narrow scope of the world we feel safe in and dream of what may become possible.  A great deal of my life has been defined by limitation, not feeling worthy of this mighty process of creation.  Feeling limited because I was from a cattle ranch, limited because I lived in a remote place like Montana where the creative spirit was not recognized and nobody wanted to visit, limited because I didn’t have enough money, limited because I was homosexual and felt like a lower class citizen, and now limited because I am aging and reluctant to possibly try to thrive in a young man’s world of male art.

There seemed to be no role models for me to follow who could guide me and as I mottled my way through the creative process.  I often gave up and abandoned those dreams because I just didn’t think I was worthy of the possibility that what I was working on would ever amount to anything.  I could recognize the impulse and could feel it buried deep within me, but I had no idea what was possible.  In a greater sense I lived only to the edge of my limitations.  Only taking baby steps forward, with long periods of adjustments to digest the accomplishments.  To stand where I stand now and now and look back I see how slow and painful the process became.  From the beginning I remember in my minds eye this was my elusive target, to stand where I stand at this moment.  I keep pondering: if I have always known what the target was, why did it take so long to get here?  I think it mostly had to do with confidence.  Living in Montana I had no peer group who could recognize what I was doing was of any value.  My work, though I continued to work on it, secretly, remained hidden and was created for my own satisfaction.  Never thinking it was very interesting or good at all, thus making the evolution slow and often painful.  I continued to look at other artists, see myself in their works, and grow by experimenting in their styles.  But it always somehow felt I could never quite find a place I belonged.  When I emulated someone else, my own work, always seem to fall sort, becoming not quite as interesting and thus creating yet another set back making me even more reluctant to show what I was creating.  It was only at the brink of despair, where my life felt it had ended, that I finally began to show the images, only because I had nothing left to lose.

I often wonder how many people create works in a vacuum that nobody sees.  How many people feel unworthy of the creative process?  How many people never begin the dream because it seems impossible?  How many people live lives stuck, without a means of expression?  Stuck in a job?  Stuck in a relationship?  Stuck in their own limitations?  I have always been a humble man and this has been me to the T, always stuck, always reluctant, living in the shadows of the theater, living in the fear of myself.

My advice now is: don’t be so judgmental of yourself, create the dream, name it, and follow it.  Somehow empower yourself with what you do.  I have made a lot of mistakes and created lots of truly bad images, but it is the process of growing so allow yourself to fail.  Allow that dream to extend beyond what you know and expand the vision to a limitless possibility.  Go for it; don’t wait until you become a middle-aged man to realize your potential.  But most important believe in it and work toward it every single day.

Though I have reached out into the world I still feel like I am confined within my small provincial town of Missoula.  I know it is time to begin thinking past myself and begin letting my idealism soar beyond who I have become here.  I need to begin to network into a larger collective of people who will challenge the way I see the world and can help me grow.  I feel like I have been stuck in the same place for a long time and it’s now time for a much broader perspective.  The things that I love about Montana and that anchor me here are also the things that hold me back.  Yes, I am on the Internet, and yes I contribute, but I feel I often stay where I feel safe, visiting the same sites in my toolbar and perhaps spend too much time on Facebook and maintaining the new site.  At the beginning of this year I spent a great deal of time looking at other artists and communicating with them. Somehow during the course of the year trying to bring it the web has consumed the later half of the year.  Some times the blog takes me twenty minutes to write and sometimes, like the one about HIV issues in my community the other day, took the entire day.  Once this blog project gets put to rest I should have more time to spend on the new site.  My vision for it is astonishing as I begin to bring in all those whose works I admire.  I would like the blog to continue, but I want the focus to now go toward others, exploring different media of art, dialogue with other artist, and writing about the history of male nude art.  It cannot be an everyday sort of thing like it has, and will allow me to spend more time to really explore the things with which I am most fascinated and intrigued.  To write something everyday and maintain it has been a major undertaking and it far more consuming then I ever thought possible.  Then to work a regular job on top of all of it, my days are just spent in the process with next to no time for myself.  But it has become a year of commitment and devotion and I thankful to have undertaken it.  I am sorry I have ignored so many fascinating people along this journey, just because I couldn’t find the time to make it all happen.  I have barely been out of the studio for almost a year now and there is a part of myself that feels it has stagnated.  I know for sure I have lived far too much in my head and not enough in my physical self and my body is now screaming out for some physical activity.  The possibilities of making money with all this doesn’t seem to occupy my thoughts as much anymore, but the focus now seems to be on doing what feels right and creating a sense of collaboration and sharing quality ideals.  This is where I actually began the process and it’s where I need continue the process.  I feel the overall integrity will outshine anything else and perhaps this is what will endure long beyond myself.  I look at the great photographers I have admired, Dorothea Lang, Diane Arbus, Paul Strand, Fred Holland Day, Minor White and Robert Mapplethorpe and I have a better understanding for their passions to create.  Part of becoming an artist is the struggle, nothing is easy, but I have always enjoyed the process and I have always struggled, and the struggle never seems to stop.  But it is the imagery of these great artists that endure and can excite us upon every viewing.  I now see I have so many friends with these gifts that I now to embrace and share.  This project, has brought too much of the focus to myself, and not enough on what surrounds me.  The path is no longer mine but that of a community.