It is one thirty a.m. I can’t seem to get to sleep to night. The studio is dark and the coldness is beginning to settle in around me. I am attired in my under amour and settled into the sofa in my shooting room. We have had such coldness for so long that it’s been hard to get out lately, but tonight it has warmed up and I can hear rain on the skylights above my head. With the blog project and my focus on getting myself organized and my regular work projects I feel like I have become a shut in. Time in this studio, my head, and the blog has all become non-linear. Tonight my head is swimming with thoughts for new ideas and my ever-constant search for focus and direction. I was going to work on my new crash course on Dream Weaver but am now just content with the stillness. It feels like this is the first moment of stillness and solitude I have been able to appreciate since the whole project began. I have so many questions that I have been looking for the answers to and if by magic they the answers are beginning to appear. My connection to this project and others is far stronger than I ever imagined. I am finding exactly what I have been searching for. To belong in a community where I was respected and could live in something far greater then myself. I have mixed emotions about whether we are born to become artist or whether it is something we learn. Growing up on a cattle ranch in a very small town in the mountains of Western Montana I was not really exposed to art, theatre, or really even television. No one else in my family was creative so how was I exposed to it? Yet I feel an innate compulsive desire to create. I know deep in my heart it has always been there. Living on a ranch you learn to improvise and become creative with finding or creating your own entertainment. To be artistically inclined and have no connection to art raises a lot of questions of uncertainty and definitely smothers your self-esteem, you become an outcast because so much of the world you are involved in just doesn’t get or understand what you are doing. I have felt lost or misplaced so much of my life. It’s definitely a harder struggle to maintain any kind of life in the arts. My brothers all seem to have a greater sense of security as we all grow older, yet I feel I am in constant struggle. My older brother, Kelley works for NASA in Clear Lake, Texas working on space travel at least this is quantitative and measurable. Life in the theater was always ephemeral, lasting but within the moment of it’s existence. The creation of art is so subjective and has a different meaning according to the individual’s perspective and does not contain value for everyone and often doesn’t acquire worth until after you are gone because it needs to be examined in retrospect and placed in context. So all we can do is live with the dream and continue the exploration.

I posed this question to several of my artist friend around the world: “Are we truly born with a gift or is it actually cultivated?” What has been your experience regarding your evolution as an artist on this issue? I will explore and share the answers in upcoming entries.

“All I wanted was the dream
Just like anybody else
I didn’t want it pushed aside
Forgotten on a shelf
But then you wake up and it seems
The dream that you dream
Was just too good to last
I wanted laughs and lots of lovers
And limitless wealth
I just want to say you’re better
Than anybody else
All I wanted was the time
To obliterate my past
I didn’t know that time can come and go
So terribly fast
It’s hard to lose it
When you had it right here
In your grasp”

Lyrics from the musical “The Boy from Oz” written by Peter Allen, Nick Enright and Martin Sherman. I saw Isabel Keating sing this song as the character of Judy Garland in the NY Broadway production. It rocked me to my core and has haunted me since.

We are two weeks down with fifty to go. So far it feels like a success. I am totally enjoying this process and boy has it kept me on task and focused on photography and my imagery which is what I have needed for a very long time. I am frustrated still by the fact that can’t quite figure out how to make links from my blog to other artists or works of art I want to reference. I have been connecting to so many fantastic artists around the world and want to begin sharing what I am learning from them but need to be able to make the link to them first. Anyone know how to make this work? Anyone know how to write the HTML code that can add the link within the text? We as artists must coexist as a collective to support, grow, and understand the significance of our work and the times in which we live and create.

I am splintered into two separate identities and still trying to figure out which direction to take myself. There is this seductive internal artist that love to explore his attraction to sensual imagery and the professional portrait business photographer who loves to do weddings, senior portraits, and entertainment. Of course living in Montana I must relay on the business side to sustain myself. Somehow the two styles have always seemed to clash and cancel each other. Years ago I built a website to showcase my portrait work but have always struggled with where to draw the lines. I did not want to show nudity on a site that caters toward the general consumer so as to not offend anyone and as a consideration toned down what I actually use yet sort of hinted at what I might also be interested in. Hence my more powerful and provocative work has been hidden for the past ten years and just recently begun to emerge. Do I have to create two separate identities to exist? If I do, how do I remain true to myself when I am a remarkable combination of both? How can I get these two worlds to coexist? Do they? Should they? Is it possible to somehow make money with the more provocative images and not to have to rely on the other? One of my goals of creating this project is to connect somehow, somewhere to someone that can help me get some kind of a show, calendar or publication. Am I doomed because I choose to live in a remote area of the world I love?

Glenn keeps asking me: “What is your target?” The answer keeps coming back to my reasons for beginning this project. To put myself entire self out there and share my creative talents with others. To create a retrospective of my images, of who I am and how I lived my life. You see I have had one of the most remarkable lives anyone could ever imagine and would like to somehow impart my vast experience on others before it is lost.

I want to share a quote from a conversation I had with Jim Ferringer, a sculptural artist and photographer, living in Indiana that hits the nail on the head. “The male nude is still a very taboo subject here in the US but I do believe it is slowly changing here, in a few centuries it might even be as accepted here as it is in Europe………The male body is as beautiful as the female body and there is no reason it should not be seen as much. I will say there are just too many times when someone post a close up of their manhood taken by a crappy cell phone and post it everywhere, I question this as art and may even set the acceptability of male nudes back.

Rus was my creative soul mate. He is a writer, teacher, and creative make-up artist who was also a model and test subject for me. We spent a great deal of time working on some of my favorite projects. One of our best shoots was exploring issues I had with a grandmother I didn’t know well. She killed herself when I was a very young. I found this old laundromat in Butte, Montana. Butte was a booming cooper-mining city some 100 years back that dried up and is now a hollow shell of those glory days. Anyway, I had this shoot in my head for a long time. Glenn was going to school in Butte at the time and Rus was just passing though on his way to start a new life and we ended up in Butte together one night. We rushed to Wal Mart for the perfect attire, distressed it off the grimy streets and began to shoot. It was a blast. There was an old gay hanging out in the laundromat that kept trying to pick up Rus because he thought she was so beautiful. You have to know that Rus in about 6’5” and when he adds heels and a wig his one tall gal. Here is what I wrote after the shoot and if you want to see more images on this series there is a link on the side. Still have difficulty figuring out the link thing on here. Just a note that Rus used this image on the cover of his first book of short stories called “I Had Mourned This Already and Other Stories”

Images of my Dead Grandmother
I never really quite knew her, but have a vague recollection of her warmth toward me. Yet I feel like she has been one of the most influential people in my life. She died when I was a three. She spent her most of her life living on the fringe of desperation, an outcast far ahead of her time, destroyed by the culture that surrounded her. She grew up in an ultra Christian house, where her cotton farm foreman father, (who shot a black man for crossing their front porch on night), molested and repeatedly raped her while her mother looked the other way and condemned her to hell. He was a very hard man and she married young to my grandfather to escape him. I believe this was the only true love and happiness she experienced in her life, she become the quintessential housewife and had finally settled into a life of “normalcy”. He was killed on his way back from World War II in a freak car accident where he was going to tell her he had met some one else and wanted a divorce, something that would haunt her the rest of her life. She spent years at the bottom of a barrel, drinking, working as a prostitute, and sleeping her way from man to man. Always running, dragging her children with her, always desperate. She had two children she tired to kill several times in fits of drunkenness, by pushing them out of windows and leaving them abandoned with strangers most of the time. She was in and out of the state mental hospitals. Finally she was pulling her life back together, sobered up, met a man she married and began to settle down. I have been told I was her greatest joy. But something happened one night that drove her to the ultimate act of desperation as she took a pistol and shot herself in the stomach. She died on the way to the hospital. I often try to imagine what was going through her head that one night.

I have always felt I was different, living on my own edge of desperation, gay, addicted to sex and drugs, hustling myself; lost in the night, drifting. Sure I was not going to make it to my 30th birthday. Was it hereditary? Was I destined to follow the same path? Though I didn’t really know her did she somehow depart her desperation on me? There has always been a bond that ties me to her. Recently I turned 42, which was the age she died, it was a very eerie time. It defiantly messed up my mother. She never got over it.

I had seen this laundromat years ago in Butte and every time I passed these windows I would see my dead grandmother hanging out in there. I have been trying to come up with a way to capture the essence of who she was and what she felt. With the help of my friend Rus Buyok I have finally been able to realize, my own feelings, anxieties, and emotions and in a way represent what she too must have gone through.

“She was happy, and perfectly in line with the tradition of those women they used to call “ruined,” “fallen,” feckless, bitches in heat, ravished dolls, sweet sluts, instant princesses, hot numbers, great lays, succulent morsels, everybody’s darlings . . . “
— Jean Genet (Querelle)

What’s happened to the art of pornography? Is it because I am getting older or have we as a gay culture just been homogenizing the images of our selves naked? I remember a time when these types of pictures of naked men were exciting and titillating. There seemed to be a raw sensual quality to the images. They were more of a sedation, becoming alluring and drawing us in. But now it’s just about putting the ol wanker out there and call it good. All the model seems to have the same shape and form with the same expression, void of any connection to what they are doing. Nobody seems to care. How do you expect someone else to buy into it if you can’t buy into yourself? Perhaps this has just become an era saturated with budging biceps, ripped abs, and protruding appendages. When did models lose any sense of personality? Perhaps with the Internet now more of it needs to be produced at such a rapid rate that any kind of artistic freedom just goes out the window. This type of work used to at least be inspirational, paying attention to light, detail, and setting; weaving fantasies for us to at least buy into and stir our imagination. Really famous art photographers of today like Steven Underhill did amazing beautiful porn and were looked up to for inspiration. Mind you I don’t think this type of imagery was meant to be high art and am aware of it’s function, but think this movement toward a faked apathetic realism is mostly flat and boring.

Recently I was going though a box of old porn, stashed in the basement and ran across an old Men Magazine from Feb 1987 that was one of my greatest treasures. For long ago I spied a young cattle ranch boy from Rexberg Idaho named Bart Ward and fell in love. Bart was so much like me and I instantly had a connection. He was my ideal dream boy; my same age, wearing wranglers, his shirt unbuttoned, holding a black cowboy hat, his slightly tousled non-styled brown hair, those piercing blue eyes gazing into mine with a gentle longing, just candidly sitting in front of his barn. The rest of the images in the series slowly revealing his not so toned, natural beautiful body, tastefully, exposing him self, with the final image of him completely nude. These images haunted my memory of Bart creating an ever-lasting desire to connect with him. Once on a trip though Idaho, my curiosity still peaked, I went 30 miles out of my way to visit Rexberg. I still feel a strong connection to this stranger I have never met. I wonder about his life and how it all turned out, as if he were a past love. Carlos Quiroz and your images of Bart bore an inspiration in me to photograph men nude. After all these years you still move and stir a passion within.

Am I the only one out there that feels that pornography has become utterly uninteresting?

“The Internet is for porn
Grab your dick and double click
The Internet is for porn, porn, porn”
Lyrics from the musical “Avenue Q” by Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez