On a more positive note...

I told myself this week I was not going to write another blog until I was feeling more positive. I was speaking to my friend Monkaey in Manchester England today and told her I had spent the last few weeks in what I could only describe as my misery silo, and by my own choice, pretty much cut off from everyone around me. The pressure of a several huge projects in my day to day work, the pressure of preparing for the gallery show, a general lack of sleep as well as an unusually strong feeling of loneliness the past few weeks culminated into a bit of a mini emotional breakdown. Too many deadlines and an emotionally fragile state really beat me up pretty badly.

With the help of very good friends, a few days in a row of at least seven hours of sleep, and a great deal of walking I think I have managed to pull out of this mental nose dive. And with my head above water for the first time since the new year began, I think I have enough perspective to get through the above experiences that are certainly still present but now seem a bit more manageable..

So let's not dwell on the negative, shall we? There have been many positive things going on, although sometimes it hard to see them when you're tucked away in your personal Misery Silo™.

With less than 20 days until the Echo Gallery show I am excited about showing again in public for the first time in five years. The pressure of getting the photos printed and framed to my liking has been quite the battle but I think by midweek I'll have everything shipped back to Chicago from various points across America and I'll be delivering a show I'm very proud of by the date they requested.

I'm showing two very different themes of nudes. The first is called Love and Ecstasy and is probably my most sexually themed work I've ever shown in public. I just looked up the words provocative, erotic and evocative hoping to use one of them to describe how I feel about the work, but the definitions of all three words contain some variation of the phrase "arousing sexual desire." However my intention is not to arouse the viewer as much as convey a sense of beautiful feminine sexuality. I myself don't find the photographs arousing.

When I'm photographing nude women I'm trying to capture what I find inspiring about the beauty of women. It's certainly a form of goddess worship. Elevating women by portraying them as graceful, intelligent and strong individuals. And women do seem to respond in a very positive manner to my work. I don't believe it's arousal. I believe it's as inspiring to them as it is to myself.

But it is much less abstract than some of my earlier nude photography. It definitely has a point of view and one several of my trusted fellow artist friends have been encouraging me to explore as well as exhibit. And so I am.

The second theme is equally powerful to me. It's a series of Underwater images that I shot in an indoor pool a few years ago, but again, have never shown in a public gallery setting. I've always enjoyed water throughout my life, being in it, or near it or watching others achieve near weightlessness in it. I'm a certified scuba diver and being ninety feet underwater is probably the closest I'll ever come to flying. It's extremely peaceful and liberating.

Because of my personal love of water, it was only a matter of time before I would figure out of a way to merge my love of water with my goddess worship. So one wintery January day I packed up the studio and my two models Melissa and J as well as a rare assistant headed to Indiana where my friend Charlie had managed to help us secure the indoor pool of his sister and her family.

We shot all day, even through an apparent equipment tragedy when I accidentally kicked my Hasselblad into the 12 foot deep end of the pool early in the shoot and shorted out our PC connection to the strobes which we needed to light the water. However, since the options where to pack up and go home with only an hour or two of shooting after a year of planning, or come up with another way to use the strobes, necessity is indeed the mother of invention. Since the strobes only fire for 1/250th of a second, there was no way to manually fire the strobes and fire the camera shutter at exactly the same time.

So I came up with the idea of leaving the shutter open for a whole second and yelling "Go!" to my assistant who would manually fire the strobes, with a little practice, while the shutter was open for that one second. The results were incredible. Ethereal, almost ghost-like bodies with trails of their graceful movements and colors blending together almost like a painting instead of a photograph. I couldn't have been happier.

And as the photographs return from the various labs this week to be framed and delivered to the gallery I am looking forward to walking into Echo Gallery (and yes I'm thrilled that they are using one of my Love and Ecstasy photographs to feature the exhibition) on opening night and seeing all of that hard work and inspiration of both myself and my generous models up on the walls. As an artist it's one of the few moments that you can stand back and see the work that you created be interpreted, enjoyed or not enjoyed but certainly discussed by a room full of people who are there to let the experience of art wash over them. It's very powerful.

It's getting late and speaking of powerful, sleep is a powerful weapon against my apparent vulnerability to depression as of late, so I'll wrap this up quickly.

My great friend Jill from California has been busy selecting one of my Italy photographs to give to some friends of hers as a wedding gift. She passed along the couple's very kind comments about my work , both travel and nude as a running series of email dialogs as they narrowed down their choices and it was one of the few rays of light during my time in that Misery Silo™. Thanks Jill.

While I was racing to get prints to the framers so I could make the gallery deadline, I was just finishing up picking the mattes and frames and sizes and was preparing to walk out the door when I passed by a woman who was having some framing done as well and she stopped me and told me how beautiful my photographs were and was I the photographer. I was at the time, really at my wits end with all the deadlines and her comment again struck me like a breath of fresh air as I paused and told her about the show. It was as I said before, one of those rare moments when the reaction of a total stranger to my work made me forget everything that I was unhappy about that day.

While all of this was going on, I learned that the sister of a very good friend of mine had finally lost her battle with a brain tumor. Wakes and funerals are always sad when they involve people who haven't lived enough of their lives and this one was no exception. But if you have to find something positive in the sadness, I guess I would say that it brings together many people who for whatever reasons don't get to see each other as much as they want to or should. It's a chance to reconnect and support each other and do the only human thing you can do when something like that happens, and that is to simply be there for people. It really helped to put things into perspective for me.

And a discussion of positive things and people in my life would be incomplete without mentioning the support I got from my reigning employee of the month Heather who talked me down off of several ledges the past few weeks and the love from my very best friends Morgan and Ryan, who constantly remind me why I am alive.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger, right? Well check out the gun show on me then!

Here's one from a recent shoot with Morgan. One of my favorites this month. I went crazy one day and bought yards and yards of unusual fabric and silk and faux fur and we had fun experimenting with all of it.