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On the second Thursday of every month I pack up my family and we all head to downtown Abilene for the celebration of creativity and culture know as ArtWalk. The Center for Contemporary Arts is always a favorite stop because I’m a huge fan of modern art and I always have to checkout the exhibit in their dedicated photography gallery.
This month I was excited to see the retrospective of fine art portrait photographer Eleonora Ghioldi. While wandering through the gallery looking at the painterly silver gelatin prints I heard a woman huffing in disgust. I turned around to look and saw a woman with two tween daughters. One girl pointed at an image and said “Look Mom, she doesn’t have any clothes on.” The woman grabbed the girls hands and ushered them out of the gallery ranting about how The Center “shouldn’t have such exhibits because children could walk in there”, and she was “going to find someone to talk to about this”!
I looked around the gallery for the obscene images the woman had labeled “filth” and couldn’t find them. All I saw were haunting beautiful images of what it means to be a woman in the quite, private moments. Ever since then I haven’t been able to get the incident out of my head. I wonder what was so objectionable? There was nothing salacious about the images. Unless the mere fact that they contain partial or implied nudity is it’s self objectionable?
The unclothed human form has been used in art to portray vulnerability, innocence, purity, love, lust, and pure celebration of God’s design since the beginning of time. I wonder if in the age of TMZ celebrity sex tapes we have lost the ability to distinguish between the lurid depiction of teen sex used to sell clothing at the mall and the sensitive portrayal of the female form used to illustrate her vulnerability and inner thoughts and feelings.
I wonder if the reason that nudity in art is subject to censorship is because we never see any positive portrayals of nudity apart from indiscriminate sex in movies and tv. I intend to continue taking my children to gallery openings and exposing them to art in all it’s forms. And I hope that when my daughter reaches an age when she starts to wonder about her worth and place in the world as a woman that the years of exposure to work like that of Ghioldi will counterbalance the influence of Go Daddy ads and People Magazine covers.
Maybe we could all benefit from viewing a little more art and a little less Desperate Housewives.
"Cigarrillo" by Eleonora Ghioldi
We still have a few spots left for our Father’s Day Mini Session Special. Reserve your spot today and have the perfect Father’s Day gift all wrapped up! Call 325-200-6404 or email kim@tiltshiftstudios.com to save your spot!
Hello All! I’m happy to announce that tomorrow we will be manning our display at Heartland Mall in honor of their 30th anniversary celebration! We’ll be out there at the main entrance from 1pm-4pm Saturday the 30th with wide array of new products to show off. This is your chance to ask us any question you may have about portraits, weddings or boudoir or flip through our beautiful sample albums. We’ll also be holding a drawing for a free family portrait session as well as extending our senior portrait sale, so come by and see us!
When I can I always try to take a break from client work to do that’s just for me. Working on personal projects is necessary, I believe to keep the creative mind sharp. Recently I’ve been exploring silhouettes in my free time.
A silhouette is defined as an outline that appears dark against a light background. More specifically, it is where your subject is seen as a black shape without detail against a brighter background. Silhouettes are a wonderful way to convey drama, mystery, emotion and mood to the viewers of your photos. Without detail and color to distract the eye the mind of the viewer is forced to contemplate shape and form alone. This makes the image a universal statement about humanity in general as opposed to a specific statement about a specific person.
The challenges of shooting silhouettes are many, but my main issue has been keeping a clean line. That exacerbated by my decision to focus on interpersonal relationships with this series. Most silhouette images feature one person because it is much easier the keep the image distinguishable that way. That would be waaaaay too easy, so of course I had to make it harder. 
So here is the result of my first series of silhouettes the theme of which is motherhood. Thanks to evryone who agreed to model for me!
Welcome to the new blog! It’s been a long time coming, The Malnourished Artist served me well but since I’m no longer a starving, malnourished, or vitamin deficient artist and photographer I needed a new space. The Malnourished Artist will still be up over on Blogger, but all new posts and sessions will be published here. I’ve moved a few recent posts over here so that it doesn’t so empty, but everything prior to 2010 will be left at the old blog.
I’ve switched over to a WordPress blog because of it’s expansive functionality. It’s easy to customize your own pages and menus so now you can sign-up for our newsletter or photography classes, purchase actions and textures, and get information on workshops all right here on the blog. So click around, check it out and let me know what you think!
