Cloudboy Loc: Orlando, Florida, USA

Much of my work focuses on the body including my own. I was at SCAD completing my MFA when I posed for and shot this using the self-timer on my camera. I have my beanie and sneakers on for two reasons: one, to indicate it is not supposed to be in another time—so much nude work in art school is made to look classical or historic—and also to suggest my identity as a skateboarder. ESPN's Body Issue has inspired me to consider our bodies as athletes, how our sports define us, so despite the very staged studio setting that, as well as the influence of art school and life drawing was a focus here.

Rich2236 Loc: E. Hampstead, New Hampshire

Very good image, Cloudboy, very tastefully done. Your lighting is great, and the addition of the skeletons, well, I like. I would like to see more.

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

Runninglate Loc: Saint Cloud, Florida

Like the natural colors in the picture.

Think my body is telling me I am ready for the Olympic Rocking Chair .........event

toxdoc42

Well done. Congratulations on the courage to post it here. I hope the other photographers will act like adults.

Cloudboy Loc: Orlando, Florida, USA

Thanks. So far they are. Most people here seem pretty cool.

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

I hear you brother. It started with that absurd and vary silly use of the term 'Master' in the MFA (Master of Fine Arts). Most likely due to the art historians having their 'Doctor of Philosophy' entitlement. Like the old gaf, 'all ways a brides maid, never the bride. As if RISD is not bad enough, U of M with it's need to make artists into undergrad art historians before they can become visual artists. Mean while at the UT, Austin the head of the Visual Arts Department, a painter, told Rauschenberg that he would be lucky to paint houses! So like Bob Dylan, he went to New York, hooked up with J. Johns and did the unthinkable and erased a de Kooning! Like Dylan, Rauschenberg is considered one of the great artists of the 20th Century.

Most visual artists regard art historians like regular people think about lawyers, "What do you call a group of attorneys at the bottom of the ocean? A good start!"

But you probably already know all that. Just saying "Hi!" to another MFA on the Hog.

Portrait Tim Summa, copy right Arnold Newman Estate.

huntmj

Great photo, interesting and unusual well done.

Cloudboy Loc: Orlando, Florida, USA

Thanks, yeah I mean I fully appreciate the worth of art history however its integration into teaching—especially for BFA undergrads—cannot be over-scaled or stifle these students' explorations of visual art. Ideally theory and history should be a catalyst to such exploration and never a blockade. So much of the life drawing approach I've seen at several art schools where I've studied including RISD and SCAD has been rooted in concepts that I find a bit outdated. So that's part of the motivation behind this portrait: to explore the contemporary versus classical nude in a drawing studio. At first my intent was to get reference photos to draw from but then I thought "well, what medium could be more contemporary than photography?" and decided to do a photo as the end product as well. I also felt since artists spend a lot of time themselves clothed drawing nude models in such studios, I would be nude myself for this portrait—it seemed only fair.

Timmers Loc: San Antonio Texas.

Many people never 'know' about the goings on at art schools. Students are say the least 'poor' or would rather put money to work in alternative purposes. I was mainly a sculpture and photography person. I rather a large person (7 foot and 270 pounds) so I was always getting asked to nude model. I don't think there were any art students who did not pose for fellow students, even faculty. Funny how the music and other 'fine art' students never 'helped' out. The science students and some of the best student modes joined us in the art department as figure models.
Remember looking for the 'skin and bone' emaciated men and women to do life drawing for basic living anatomy studies?

Art school was a blast, I never did the BFA approach, had a BS from Sam Houston University in Huntsville Texas, great technical foundation. But I was so lucky to work at MD Anderson in the Dept. of Pathology, so almost everyday I was sent to the hospital morgue. I think that any decent university art department needs to hook up with a major hospital to have art students learn anatomy just like the old masters learned their trade.

The truly great thing that I got from my MFA studies was to understand criticism and how it is and must be grounded in the history of the mediums. With out that grounding, one can leave art school and never learn a thing about the craft and discipline. The faling for many MFA candidates and those who have graduated with an MFA is that they go out without the necessary tools and gifts to actually make critical art. Making art is a natural and intuitive event for a person. The MFA needs to see that the artist is a form of Nietzsche's idea of an Ubermench in the field of the fine arts.