John Calvin
We all get them... those hurtful moments. Anyone engaged in the public arena of sharing their art (and thereby, their life) will, on occasion, find themselves berated by someone for what they're doing.
It was waiting for me at the start of a New year - words which defined my work as immoral and demeaning were bad enough but the attack proceeded to define those I worked with as morally and socially impure purely because some of my images of them were nudes.
It isn't the first time, of course, I've encountered such miss-placed babble, but the question you always need to ask is why - why would someone bother to visit a section of an artist's portfolio which is clearly tagged 'adult' content, find the images which are labelled 'fine art nude' and then proceed to protest the 'public' display of such images, especially when there are far more public displays of material that are, generally, far more explicit than what was depicted in the particular image they had chosen to seek to so demean?
The aim of such violence is clear. The tongue is used, as the Apostle James notes, to do evil - to seek to taint what has been done to praise what is good and lovely - to scar something that seeks to say to the very one who scorns it 'there is a beauty in this world we cannot escape, no matter how loud we bellow to deny its call".
I hope that person so troubled by my nude work finally finds a better way of examining what's truly involved here, and that my images continue to help people to see beauty, and the one who gives such splendor to our world.
