The photograph on the right is a portrait of the poet-artist Gavin Dillard, whose poem I subsequently superimposed over the drawing in gold leaf. One of the greatest challenges in making the studio photograph is creating fresh meaning in a genre usually limited to the dual elements of body and seamless paper. Now that underwear ads ore masterworks of this art form, the time has come for artists to move on. For example, my Torso Belvedere, pages 74-75, has a mate. He and his mate are physically involved.
Nothing succeeds better in the attempt to add life to a genre than to just let life happen.
This freedom resulted in some happy aesthetic accidents. The pictures which include our cats are a case in point. Our curious cats can open doors. Sometimes they just walked in for a sniff. Sometimes they adopted on elegant rhyme with the model.