Tag Archives: nudist

April 21, 2024 · 2:34 am

Drawing Nudists

Drawing people with no clothes on is something I actually learned to do in college. Even more ironic is the fact that I was still suffering a nude-o-phobia at the time due to being traumatized by a sexual assault at age ten that had been a repressed memory until the year before I took the anatomy drawing class with live nude models. It was not a class full of guys since you had to have made high grades in three previous levels of drawing classes. There were only three other males in the class, and none of them were significantly more secure in their own nakedness than I was. Virgins all. (What do you expect from male art majors?) But it began my journey into drawing nudes and eventually becoming a nudist.

Drawing a nude figure in a work of art, whether by painting, drawing with a pencil, colored pencils, or digital art on a computer, is an essential step to creating believable figures even after you put clothing on them. Anatomical correctness in structure and proportions are far more realistic when originally drawn by your practiced hand as a nude figure. My mother noted when watching me paint that the pencil drawing underneath looked like a naked body until clothed by a rendering of a body covering, even if I was working from a model or photo that was fully clothed. Being a modest Methodist she often asked if I intended to draw clothes on before painting, which I usually did… especially on pictures painted at home where she would see.

When I am intentionally drawing a nudist picture, I will depict an activity that I enjoy doing in the nude myself. The figure, a male figure, represents me. I do tend to depict myself as an innocent child rather than a fat old man with a beard. I also draw nude girls, usually in the age of innocence, because I don’t have any reason to do porn. And drawing nudes helps me immensely with my own positive body image problem.

Pictures of nudists do not need to reveal sexual features. I don’t particularly enjoy drawing genitals. And the idea of the picture usually does not require those things to be in the picture.

Sometimes the theme of the picture is intended to be humorous. Streaking back in the 1970s always got a lot of laughs, as well as evil looks from old church ladies.

Fairy nudity is also usually given a pass. Why would tiny magical creatures really need clothes?

Some pictures evoke memories of camping, Something we did as a family every summer in the 60s and 70s, though never in the nude… except in my imagination.

And of course, some pictures need to exist simply because the human body is inherently beautiful.

All of this is talked about in the essay I wrote about it in book form on Amazon. It goes into much greater detail with many more illustrations.

The Mirror in the Clown’s Hand

Self-reflection is the bane of stupid people. Essentially, they don’t want to risk encountering evidence that they actually are stupid. It would shatter their world to learn that they are idiots and most of what they believe is true is actually wrong. This fact goes a long way towards explaining why the Republican Party in its current form even exists, let alone the actions of the current mutant Cheetos monster that pilots their agenda and hates healthcare, the Special Olympics, and Puerto Rico.

So, if I am doing a self–reflection piece today, then that proves I am not a stupid person, right? What do you mean you agree with that? Yes, I can actually hear you mentally answering my questions as you read this. And if you believe that, then you have proven that even relatively smart people like you and I are capable of stupid thinking.

I believe in some stupid things, even though I think I am not stupid.

An example of this stupidity factor is my lingering belief that I am a nudist. I mean, I am rarely ever nude any more. I keep most of me covered up constantly because when my psoriasis plaques dry out they tend to flake and itch and force me to scratch to the point of infected bloody sores.

Obviously this is not totally a photograph from the 60’s. That does not make it a total lie either, though.

I have been pretty much accepted as a member of the nudist community on Twitter. I enjoy the artful pictures of nude people they share with me. And since I did a couple of blog posts for nudist websites, there are actually completely nude pictures of me available on the internet. I can be found on Truenudists.com for one, if your eyes can stand the horror. But I have only been to a nudist park, the Bluebonnet Nudist Park in Alvord, Texas. twice as an actual nudist. I can tell you, they were very hot days even though I was not wearing clothes. I am comfortable with nudity. I am comfortable around nude people. I fully accept it all as a non-sexual thing. But am I really a nudist? Or am I only playing at it? If you follow me on Twitter, then you know I don’t retweet pictures of naked people. I engage a lot with other writers there, and most of them are not also nudists, or even open-minded about naturism. I write about nudists in some of my books, but they are not about nudism, and most of them don’t even mention it. So, what good does it do me to think I am a nudist? Well, the very idea of it does a heckuva good job of embarrassing my wife and daughter. So, I do get some crazy-old-coot satisfaction out of it. Otherwise it simply proves that rational and otherwise intelligent people can be committed to irrational ideas.

I am also of the often mocked and ridiculed opinion that not only are alien beings from other worlds real, they are capable of space travel and have been visiting us for as long as there has been an us. I did not always believe this, however. Before I wrote my novel Catch a Falling Star I believed as Carl Sagan said on the original Cosmos that it is wrong to accept things without proof, and true results are testable. My novel was about aliens who watched a lot of Earther TV and learned to speak English from watching I Love Lucy reruns, I wanted to make the aliens different from humans, but at the same time, alike with humans in the most fundamental ways that translate easily into humor and relatability. Not all of my hero-characters were Earth humans.

Brekka the Telleron tadpole (also a nudist) with her friend Lester the man-eating plant (who only ate her once)

As I did research on the internet (a tool I didn’t have when I originally created the story in the 1970s), I found a ton of researchers and writers and con men and MUFON and the Disclosure Project and nuclear physicists and astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell who were all believers and mostly not stupid. Wow! What a huge and complicated hoax! Why would anybody believe , based on so little tangible evidence, and so much contradictory evidence, that the government’s position could possibly be right? I learned that I now believed, until significant further proof comes along, that I believe stupidly in alien visitors.

Today’s self-reflection post has now proven that I am a stupid old coot who thinks he is a nudist and an insightful conspiracy theorist. But the results of my look into the mirror have not made me upset about my stupidity. Maybe I am simply satisfied nudism is healthy and the universe is more complex than I am capable of understanding. Whatever the case, that’s enough with the mirror for today. You have to keep such dangerous weapons out of the hands of clowns.

One Scary Thing

Playing a piano recital completely naked is a nightmare some kids have when their piano teacher schedules their first recital. But it is something that is only a nightmare, not something a piano teacher would ever do in reality. Not require the piano student to perform nude, I mean. They will definitely schedule the recital and cause the nightmare.

The thing is, however, that the picture above is metaphorical, not literal. A performer on piano, or guitar, or doing stand-up comedy routines, or even teaching from the front of the classroom makes you feel exactly like that. You can’t do it by keeping even one square inch of yourself hidden away, concealed under clothing, lies, or misdirection. The contents of your inner heart has to be there on display.

I remember being naked in front of a classroom of mostly hostile and mostly illiterate eighth graders on the first day of classes in the Fall of 1981. I wasn’t literally naked. But they knew I didn’t speak or understand Spanish the way 85% of them did. They knew I was nervous and feeling awkward. They knew I didn’t know most of the truly terrible things they did to the poor teacher-lady who had tried to teach them English in that same classroom the year before. There were firecrackers under the desk, thumb tacks on the teachers’ chair, classroom fights, insults in Spanish and English directly to her face, classroom posters destroyed… they drove her out of the classroom screaming to the airport in San Antonio and out of teaching and the State of Texas probably for good. I had no armor, no experience, and only a few teacher tricks in my bag of… well, you know, tricks they had all seen already many times. I might as well have been literally naked.

I remember the advice I got in my college speech class about giving yourself confidence by imagining your audience was naked. But 25 thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds, some with mustaches, some of the boys had mustaches too? Picturing them naked worked against me. They were scarier that way.

I never seriously entertained ideas of becoming a nudist back in my teaching days. I had to consider the morals clause in my endless string of one-year contracts. I had to consider my own post-traumatic fear of being naked after what happened to me at ten. But my encounters with nudists and nudist literature did get me wondering… did make me actually curious.

Like most Americans, I never thought of nudism as something for me, rather, a thing that could be tolerated about unusual people who lived in their heads too much and were often too much of an exhibitionist. But I did create nudist characters for some of my fantasy-comedy novels which I seriously began self-publishing after retiring as a teacher. Specifically, the Cobble Sisters and their family, based on twin girl students who claimed to be nudists in my classroom, though they may have been telling fictional stories themselves.

And then real nudists and naturists began finding my books and liking them. I became a part of the online Twitter-nudist community.

And while talking to a family psychotherapist, he suggested to me that I should deal with some of my problems by choosing one thing I was basically afraid to do, but might provide a thrill or other positive feelings. We talked about bungee jumping and sky diving, but those were out because of my health problems. And then he suggested I might profit from actually trying nudism.

One terrifying thing. A nudist website wanted someone to write a blog post for them about first-time visits to a nudist park or other nude venue. I applied for the job. They published my application piece and then asked me to follow through. I visited Bluebonnet Nudist Park on a Friday in July of 2017.

It was, in fact, one of the scariest things I have ever done on purpose. But once I was actually naked among other naked people, I really felt the power of my accomplishment. I overcame a childhood fear. I accomplished one scary thing. And it felt great. I would eventually do it again after the pandemic.

So, I am one of those unusual and somewhat crazy people now. My wife and children are mortified. I am driving away blog readers who think I must be nuts. And I feel good about it.

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Drawing Nudists

The Mirror in the Clown’s Hand

I believe in some stupid things, even though I think I am not stupid.

One Scary Thing

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