It’s near the end of January, 2025. My last missive on this site was in November 2024. What has happened in that period? Well, quite a lot, and not really much of anything.
After I got out of the mental health ward in October, I went on a bit of a drawing bender. I had a new idea, I was enjoying it quite well, and I was psyched for a wonderful Nudevember 2024 stretch. However, a few things happened in succession that I’m still trying to work my brain around and feel right about.
The first was that my original idea for Nudevember fizzled out. I got almost zero engagement or interest at all. From next to nobody responding, submitting or even acknowledging the project. This is different than what has happened in the past, to quite a large extent. I am not quite sure exactly why this was a thing, but there are a few probable factors. One is that people simply aren’t willing to engage anymore. Another is that people are becoming more and more worried about having their bodies out there, even in a simplistic, hard to recognize artistic form. Social Media, for all its potential benefits, has mostly become as non-social as a thing can get. Even anti-social. So that doesn’t help. I’ve also removed myself from a lot of the nudist community where I would have drawn from a larger pool… and the reasons for THAT I’ve gone into in the past and are numerous and varied. There’s also the possibility that my art just doesn’t speak to people like I believe it does. Perhaps I’m simply not as good as I think I am. Imagine that.
The other major thing that happened is that BlueSky basically accused me of putting ‘Sexual Depictions of a Minor” on my account and threatened to ban me. The image in question I’ve spoken about elsewhere, but was a simple minimalist reproduction of a famous photograph by a Hungarian photographer from the early 1900s. It depicted two young Romani children sharing a tender kiss. They happened to be nude, but the photograph showed them from the side, engaged in no other contact, showing no visible genitalia and, had they had clothes on, would have been considered a nothing event. However, because they were naked, it immediately flagged, to a HUMAN moderator, that the content was sexually explicit.
This shook me to the core in many ways. Not the least because I’ve never considered anything I draw to come anywhere close to being considered sexual. In fact, you would have to twist yourself into a pretzel to find a way to describe my work as sexual in any way outside of the own desires you may carry in your brain… and it disturbed me extremely that a human moderator (or more) on a website could look at the image they looked at and determine that it met a sexual designation. Like they were telling on themselves. It really kind of disgusted me and ever since I’ve pulled back on BlueSky in a major, major way.
In fact, combined with the disappointment I felt over Nudevember’s failure, it has set me back to this day in my drawing. I still feel a level of disappointment for society that is basically stopping me from wanting to draw, because while I know that drawing for myself should be the main thing, the fact is that I like having something to say to others, but I guess I’ve had to deal with the fact that I might only like saying it as long as people agree with me.
So I need to find that place in me that is angry, beautiful, strong, stubborn and aggressive enough where I can continue to say what I need to say even when confronted with people that hold a brutally wrong view of my art and the world, and continue to create my statements in spite of them.
I’m not there yet. I would like to be, but I’m not. I’m still frightened. I’m still disappointed. I’m still angry in the wrong way.
I feel like I’m getting closer every day, and I’ve been working on switching out my thinking patterns so I’m not always focusing so much on negativity and what’s going wrong all the time…. But after decades of being in that headspace, that’s not even close to being easy either.
So that’s what’s been going on the last 3 months. I’m working on things, I’m slowly getting better, but I have a long road ahead of me. This blog will be different going forward. I will be focusing fully on positive thoughts, writings and possibly articles, although I am really no writer in the sense of journalistic integrity. I’m going to try seeing if I can become a contributor on Planet Nude, although I’m not sure what that will look like at this point.
So anyway, that’s it from me for now. Take care of yourselves, and as always…. Stay Naked.