Category Archives: Creative Process

about the process of the creation of art

End Of Summer

Something in the air changes and it suddenly feels like fall. Labor Day is somehow that turning point weekend in the United States where the day after summer seems to disappear. It was the first football game of the season, the final family campout, and the last days of the rodeo. This morning I began putting together my fall schedule that will take me through to the end of the year. The University in back in session and I begin a new season of working on their shows tomorrow night. It is also the season when all the new students are back in town and I can begin my process of recruiting some new subjects. I need to get back into my studio again and begin shooting. It feels like I have been distracted the past month or so getting ready and going on the trip that I have not had much time to work on my imagery. I spent most of my spare time throughout the weekend pulling things together for the upcoming new website. It is progressing very well and we should begin putting it up on the server the next couple of days and then begin refining it. I am hoping to have something running by the end of next week, well at least the initial home pages and some of the galleries.

I still have so many images to work through that have piled up. It feels like I start a series and never quite get through it and then never quite get back to it. I have still only worked half way through the images of the trip to Europe and the Mineral County Fair and Rodeo images I took before I left. So I am really going to try to focus on getting caught up today. I have had a few jobs that I needed to complete last week that put me in delay on my personal stuff. I want to work on my yard now that it has cooled outside, but could not even seem to find time for that. The rest of this week I will be slammed but next week it will all begin to open up and I will get back to my fall creative work.

Autumns for me are the times that I accomplish my greatest nude image projects. Everything else begins to slow down as I put the gardens to bed and tie up loose ends from the summer. Glenn typically goes to North Dakota for several months to work on a soil-sampling project and I can totally get into sync with my own rhythm and work at a pace completely uninterrupted. I can work late into the night and often get up early to catch the morning light. Though with this blog project it does seem to eat a good chunk of my day. But there is something about the fall that I feel most focused. I somehow feel this one is going to become on of my most extraordinary ones ever. After beginning this project I felt I have a genuine focus this fall. There are now goals to accomplish and a standard to rise up and create. In a sense I feel like this year of my life has begun to go backwards. It’s like that movie where the guy reverses in aging. I am excited to my core again about who and where I am. It seems the age issues that I have been dealing with have somehow vanished and my life has taken on a greater purpose that is beyond myself.

Double Edged Sword

Today I begin to move into the last phase of this project. Hard to believe I am two thirds of the way through it. Wow what an adventure it is becoming and it’s amazing where it’s been in such a short time. My focus today and probably this upcoming week is on creating a website; but I am having great difficulties trying to figure out where and how it needs to go. I have been looking for templates but am not finding anything I really like that I fit into and I have been working with Adobe’s Dreamweaver to see how I am able to modify or create my own, but that is proving to be difficult as well. I have decided to call in an expert who can help me figure it out. So this afternoon’s about meetings to get started and see what I can come up with.

Actually my brain is completely fried and I am having a hard time focusing at the moment.

My head is spinning with so many ideas and possibilities but the truth of the matter is do I have access to what I need living and being here in Montana to make it happen? It seems simple enough right! But Montana is still a place where people are reluctant to expose themselves, especially for art, and though I have been fortunate to photograph them in the past, it is always a major scramble to meet and photograph someone new. I have already created a body of work but it remains stagnant if I am not able to continue the exploration and grow in the process. I cannot spend the time I need seeking new explorations if I am so wrapped up in trying to figure out the business and marketing end of this process. I feel like I am being cut by a double edge sword of where to best use my resources. Now that I am beginning to meet people who can and are willing to help me move to a new level I am faced with the question: Can I do what is necessary to make it happen and still maintain the work? Or do I continue the work and slowly allow things to evolve along the process and possibly lose some of those connections that are willing to help now? I can see where I could very easily become lost somewhere along the way. I know it’s not going to all happen at once and I really don’t expect it to. It seems the creation of art itself is the easy part, but making something of it becomes the complicated part. I keep reminding myself to take a deep breath and take it one step at a time. Perhaps I am allowing people to influence me far too much. It seems since I have been home, this is all becoming so complex, it’s almost like I can taste the dream, but can I really get there and remain true to what I started? I am beginning to wonder if moving to the next level is where I really want to be. Today it’s just overwhelming.

The Necessity To Consolidate

It’s time now to make the leap and begin working toward exposing my work on a broader market. I have been having many dialogues with several people over the past weeks and since my return trying to come up with a plan or outline on how to best orchestrate what I want to accomplish. First and foremost I realize I must begin to consolidate all of my work to one place, where people can come and find everything about this project and me. One of the main issues I am currently dealing with is that I have two separate identities. One is me as a portrait photographer under my company name of Cyr Photo LLC doing wedding, family, senior portrait, headshots and Arts and Entertainment. This part of the photography business over the past couple of years has been declining, with the saturation of too many do it your selfers and the wannabe photographers eating away at the market. The second part is creating these nude art type images more out of experimentation and exploration of this Naked Man Project. The two cannot merge and must remain separate for me being in Montana. I have sort of taken this year off from my from my regular photo business to focus on getting this project underway and seeing if I can make some sort of business out of it. So far it has been a lot of fun and I feel I am growing as an artist, but I am beginning to realize that it’s going to take a lot of time at self-promotion to get where I need to be. As much as I have worked to make it happen, I have not seen any revenue from the nude side, and still have to rely on other work to stay afloat. So I am to the point where I need to begin promoting and working toward both sides. Therefore I have to create two distinctive different promotional approaches and formats and am having a hard time right now figuring out what the priority should be. I can see the art photography gaining momentum and have begun dialogue to begin finding that focus and if I begin to pull back any, all I have worked toward can very quickly disappear. I now realize they are both something that I must put into the mix of my daily juggle.

Priority on the Naked Man front is to begin to bring it all together as a central entity. I am now spending every extra moment toward creating a site that can contain and showcase these works. I plan to spend most of the rest of this week and weekend putting things together. I have a rough draft of the new format and now just to refine it.

One of the things that have surprised me over this past year is how well I have actually been able to pull together promotional stuff for myself. Creating profiles on all my Facebook accounts, Red Bubble, proposal for the Kickstarter program, and the creation of this blog. The target is becoming clearer and more defined with each round and it is just now a time to centralize and build upon it. I have the tools and skills all in place it’s now just a matter of putting the time into making it happen. Do I really need to sleep?

Memory Of The Senses

I am still a bit completely out of whack and trying to get myself back on track. Taking a couple of weeks away from the studio and other work seems to have just put me a bit behind in some areas and this week is mostly about getting caught back up. It still amazes me how much I manage to accomplish within the course of the day. I spend about three hours gardening in the mornings, then photography all afternoon, sometimes squeezing a little nap in before heading off to spend my five hours at UPS in the evenings. Everything seems to be part time in my life and I have been a good one for juggling all this. The gardens seem to be one of the places of my greatest joy. After seeing such extraordinary gardens in Paris, I am totally inspired with some new ideas. I really see, what an extraordinary design I have put forth in some on my own spaces. A garden is like a living sculpture that is constantly evolving and changing. Something new blooms every day. Fortunately here in Montana we actually have winters and so you really see the evolution of the entire garden process with each distinctive season. Yet it allows my winters the freedom to focus back on creative photographic projects. The gardens become my time and space to reflect on myself, dream and plan. It’s my daily breath of fresh air and becomes a renewal of my spirit.

I do not mean to come across with mostly negative intent in doing this Naked Man Project. I particularly feel quite healthy and balanced and after this past trip. I am definitely coming to a greater understanding of who I am currently and where I have been and yes there are issues that I am still dealing with. When I reflect on the past, it is that a reflection, and a sort of remembrance, as was yesterday’s post. I believe the past is the key to what makes us what we have become today and that everything we learned springs from our wealth of experience. But I think there are great lessons and insight to be gained by understanding the history of who we are. Part of my mission with this Naked Man Project was to give a true reflection of my time and history as I have lived it. To be a young man, growing up on a cattle ranch in the mountains of Montana, who turns out to be gay and creative is remarkable feat in and of it self. And yes there have been major pitfalls and obstacles to over come to get to this place where I exist currently. This is my experience! I have given myself one year to explore this identity and somehow come to some understanding of where I currently stand, but part of the fact remains that it is still a chronicle of a man becoming a product of his time, living in an era of the greatest changes of the gay movement which has been extraordinary the past 30 years in it’s evolution. And yes I see what an extraordinary part of it I have become and continue to be. It is my objective in my imagery to redefine the way we look at our selves in the sexual/sensual self. To see the body and it’s soul in a positive light. We tend to live in a world of exploitation, where the self-image is completely compromised, and so much of our culture has such an unhealthy outlook on who we are. I know this because these are the issues I have spent my own life dealing with, first hand. But we cannot ignore, nor should we forget, the history from which this all springs. I now see how the Naked Man really is the exposure of myself and the discovery of identity, and the way I have viewed this change. I will and want to delve into that past to take you there first hand.

In a sense the project become three fold. While it exposed the past, it still is a growing and learning of my own self and gaining perspective and ultimately the birth and creation of my self-expression. When I first took up photography, I was enamored by the works of Robert Mapplethorpe. In many ways I saw him as a pioneer who was able to unabashedly expose his private world for others to see. He very shockingly showed a mirror unto ourselves and to the world, what we as a culture were too afraid to examine. That time was ripe and he became the product of his time. I remember how squeamish yet enthralling it was to examine his work for the first time when I discovered his books, many years after his death. This was what brought me to taking of a camera and focusing it on my own existence. Please bear with me in the upcoming months as I explore that past and come to terms with my own history. In a sense this is like tending my gardens where the sense memory is re-ignited with a certain touch, a smell, or the color of a flower that connects me to places in my memory. These thoughts reoccur each year, at the same time, in the same place, in the same manner, and are vividly relived each time. I have been doing it for so long, it’s as if the plants and trees that surround me now contain the memory of my life.

A Leap of Faith

OK here we go: a leap of faith. I am finding t I am wanting to retreat into my sorted world of insecurities, which I must admit can consume me. But now is the time to really begin my focus on beauty and art and that’s what this project is really about. I am deeply romantic at my core; it’s one of the things that really excites me about who I am. I don’t really care to change the world, and for the most part am very withdrawn from it. I love soft light and constantly strive to work with it in my imagery. In fact my entire studio is completely wired on a series of dimmers so that I can have control of creating the perfect environment for whatever mood I am in. Music is an integral part of that romantic allure. I love music; all kinds of music and often becomes part of the design. For me this is what the photograph becomes about, setting up the environment for a tone, a feeling, an emotions and creating that entire state of existence. It becomes intoxicating, entrancing, and often time very hypnotic. It allows me to bond with the subject so we can go on a highly personal journeys together, to get to the core of what I am feeling, and explore our identities.

When I first got into photography I was drawn to the images of Robert Mapplethorpe. I was not sure why. Was it the mystic behind the person? Was it his bold approach to subject matter he tackled? There was always something in the images that riveted me to his subjects. I spent many years searching for my connection to his work. Much of his stuff was so far removed from my world and existence. Yet it was haunting, like a siren song. There was such poetic beauty in the imagery. Year later after I had begun to develop my own style I read an interview with him that suddenly made the connection for me. He basically said that you must have a strong connection to the subject. He loved to talk to, in fact insisted on personally connecting to his subjects first. This builds trust and draws them in. In this business I meet so many strangers. When I begin to work with someone new I always plan some time where I can talk to them, really connect to who they are. I am curious about people by nature and have an even stronger curiosity about what it is within myself that is drawn to this particular person. The photographic sessions then becomes an exploration of myself, my own personal journey, and to eventually unveil what is remarkable about this subject. And yes, every single person has some remarkable quality within them, it’s just a mater of how guarded they are to reveal it and let it surface. Somehow people trust you as a photographer and are more susceptible to allowing you into their inner selves. Some of these bonds last, some of them are fleeting, but it always lingers with what’s left behind, the image.