Drawing my body nude

Thesis (M.F.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2004Divided into five sections that mirror mankind's fall and return to grace, Drawing My Body Nude is a modern-day examination of the Romantic notions of innocence, experience and experienced innocence. Covering a span of nearly fifteen years, the text weaves together four seemingly disparate storylines: the author's addiction to, and subsequent recovery from, pornography; his mother's enrollment in a nude drawing class at a local college; the death of his patriarchal grandfather; and his own coming of age as he and his wife raise a family of their own. The text is driven by religious (specifically Latter-Day Saint), artistic and metaphysical themes. By questioning the complex issues surrounding birth and death, human existence and the afterlife, nude art and pornography, love and lust, as well as raising children and what it means to be a child, the text is an attempt to both reconcile and understand physical and inherent beauty.Part I. Premortality -- My natural body -- Finding a couch to sit on -- Nude bodies -- A sort of homecoming -- Part II. The fall -- Leaving Eden -- Controlling the weather -- We miseablʹes -- Swing -- Part III. Redemption -- Baring my soul -- The definition of betweeness -- Bearing my soul -- Part IV. Endurance -- Inheriting the apron -- The story never ends -- Destiny of names -- Drawing -- Part V. Immortality -- Coming home -- Art mindedness -- Death of a chicken -- Drawing like children