I have reached a quandary in the direction I need to go? The website seems to have grown, although it has become a lot of work, but the focus of the work seems more based in the business of maintenance and refining the underlying structure. What I really miss and love is the daily blog and connecting my thoughts, concepts, and ideas into the project. It is becoming more and more difficult to understand where the focus needs to be and what takes priority. I still work a part time job for UPS in the evenings and recently my two other management partners have quite so I am dealing with the turmoil of that environment as well. I felt last year’s blog project was important enough and there still seems to be massive enough traffic on it that I have spent a great deal of time the past month trying to clean up and create an integration into the new site. I have also been shooting a tremendous amount of new work with new models, trying to refine what I think is becoming my style. But what I seem to be lacking is the addition and updating of new content to the site. Yes I have now built and created galleries of last year’s blog posts, but it seems to be a rehashing of old ideas. It is also creating a broader perspective of my body of work that I am hoping will begin to expand into new galleries. My life seems to have become a flow of diligent work toward this end that I am becoming very absorbed within. But it just seems to take more of my time than what is available to go around. Perhaps I would need a staff of people to pull of what it is I envision and dream of what the project should become. How do I prioritize where my energy needs to go? How do I find time for myself? Is this me? Not many people get an opportunity to stir their imagination and explore their creative side as much as I have. This appreciation grows day by day as overwhelmed as I may feel. This site has become a legacy of who I am and how I have lived my creative life. The network seems to grow closer and closer to my home as I am reaching to understand my own community and the source from where my creativity springs. This too takes time.

The other day I set up a connection to things I love by creating The Naked Man Project Store. It is a store that contains many of the books and media that is dear to me. That which has inspired, captivated, and excited me toward my creative process. It has been fun to revisit all that and make the connection to that past. In a way it sort of defines my present and reminds me of my dreams. I love books and they are the passion of my existence. I am currently watching a series called The Tudors and see a living painting in every image. This is what creativity is about; to stir the imagination, to see beyond and within ourselves what it is we desire to become.

I had to take the site down for a couple of days as we begin to deal with some maintenance issues that have begun to arise. The original server where I began the site was an independent server that contained several other sites. The last couple of months, as my site has gown, it’s now larger than what the original server can handle and at the rate of speed it’s growing would soon cause damage to the original server. It’s not the volume of he content but the volume of traffic flow and it can no longer handle the bandwidth of so much traffic. We felt the need to move and upgrade the project to a bigger server. In actuality this is a good problem to have. The numbers of hits and flow of traffic through the site are staggering; I had no idea that the site would be come this popular. As the amount of unique visitors grows to thousands each month (return visitors) this indicates that site is a huge success. About 75 percent of the people visiting the site keep returning. The site now gets 90,000 page views with about 300,000 hits per month.

The last couple of days as we have been trying to migrate the site to the new server we have encountered some issues with ghosting between the servers and we are in the process of cleaning up some problems that created broken links for images and galleries. There are still many of the links from the blog into the website that will still be broken. You can still navigate the blog and the index I have created of the entire year-long blog project is functional. But any links to images may not work. I am sorry for the inconvenience and we should have everything back to normal in the next couple of days.

This is a good problem to have since what began as a simple blog communication between other artist friends working in the subject of nude male art and grown to a larger audience of appreciation.

Thank you for your patience and support on the project.

Terry

I have been doing an in depth research project on the painter known as Caravaggio lately. Trying to research his life and who the mysterious man might have been. He was not overly popular that the time he was painting and many of his images were rejected because he chose to use prostitutes and common people as the models for his religious works of saints. But he was one of the first to bring a certain reality into his paintings. He insisted on using live models as his subjects, trying to realistically create the setting from which he would paint, without any kind of preliminary sketching or studies. Baskets of fruit actually showed the mildew and decay far from perfection or the idealism that the contemporaries of his time created. They were studies of real life. He did tend to use a heightened and very theatrical lighting technique for his subjects. This too was also real, usually based on an actual light source, a window, a candle, or a lamp. So the fall of the light on the subjects realistically going to actual darkness. Many of his images are about light emerging from darkness. Very theatrical. The realism of his subjects expressions give them inner life and a depth that becomes absorbing for most viewers.

He was a man obsessed with his art and the realism of capturing the essence of the human spirit in his imagery. There is great speculation on his sexuality, especially leaning toward a bisexual tendency. He never married and used many of his male friends as the models of his paintings, especially the early ones. His work did not become popular until there was a seemingly obsessive resurgence of this work in the mid twentieth century. Though the images were never signed, except one, his style was highly recognizable and become an inspiration for generations of painters who followed. His life seemed to be in constant turmoil and the later part he spent fleeing for his life as he was convicted and sentenced to death for accidentally killing another man he meant to only wound in the groin area but severed his femoral artery and he bled to death. Many of his late images depict decapitation, which he became obsessed with since it was the means of execution at the time, his own head becoming the likeness of many of those paintings. He eventually died a poor man with nothing as his work and notoriety disappeared.

I do not try to compare myself to Caravaggio, but his work and imagery have a strong influence on my style. Having worked in theater as a lighting designer I am captivated by his use of light or probably more importantly his lack of the use of light. Much of his images are in darkness. But where the light comes across that what it reveals is brilliant. I am now spending a great deal of time working within my own studio trying to create some of the light from his painting. Though I have an arsenal of light filtration tools at my disposal, the balance becomes quite difficult. I have a tendency to want to fill the shadows too much with some sort of light to bring out more details, fearing the images will become too uninteresting with so much darkness. Of course every artist must find his own means of expression and what feels right, so the exercises merely become a jumping off point. It is not only about the light, but also more about the psychology of the subject. I look for subjects who bring a natural realism to the studio when we work. This way we are able to get at the core naturalism I have always admired. After all, art is really an expression of ourselves and how we relate to our own universe. There is something in the darkness of Caravaggio that ignites a passion deep within me that I relate to from my core. Perhaps it is my own turmoil that I see in others reflected back into myself. Much of the doubt I struggled with last year creating the blog project has brought a new light to myself. I am far more comfortable and confident then I was last year. It is now interesting to see it begin to emerge in the now explorations of my current work.

It feels like I have fallen under a strange curse with my project and what I want to achieve with it.  I am having great difficulty recruiting subjects to work with.  I have been working like crazy to network and tried many different approaches but, now that people know and see what I am doing, everyone seems intimidated by it and no one is interested in working with me.  Most everyone I approach says, “I do not look like that!”   I am not in that good of shape, and I think there is an overwhelming fear that everything I do will end up on the web site.  This is utterly far from the truth on both accounts.  Most of the people I work with are not really in great shape and where I began with the project so long ago was on a exploration of who people were, at what ever condition they were, just getting to the core of what is their sensual best: an exploration of their own identity into themselves.  It’s more a process of discovery of who they are.  But it seems that what started out as a process of discovery has become a tangible object in the form of an image or art form.  I think I was better off less known and undiscovered.  The problem isn’t that I can’t connect to them because I am connecting to many.  Most everyone has either seen or heard of my work or me, but there now seems to be a fear of what I create.  It’s very odd and I can’t quite isolate the root of its cause.  Once people have met me and worked with me, it seems we become great friends and I am able to work with them over and over again.  As far as posting images of my subjects, I do get their consent before anything is posted and have removed a couple of subjects from the site who originally consented and signed model releases allowing my to publish their images.  When they thought my work with getting too popular and reputation growing beyond their comfort level where they might become recognizable.  Again this becomes the curse of success.  I am running out of approaches and not sure how to find new subjects.

In the mean time I have been building the website, working on past images I have shot, and networking with other artists around the world.  It seems my plight is common to many other artists, no mater where they live.  We all struggle with finding subjects who are willing to work.

Not all of my images are nude or completely naked.  It is not a requirement to work with me.  Subjects take it where they are most comfortable.