Yes! It's gardening season again!!! Thank God for sunshine and jalapeños! I can taste the homemade salsa and fresh green beans now. Oh, I can't wait!

Just look at that face!

Need I say more?

Congratulations Brian!!!

The time has come for Brian to say goodbye to the Atlanta Athletic Club and move on to a higher position within the golf course profession. He interviewed at Reynolds Plantation, a golf course south of Atlanta and Country Club of the South, which is right up the street from where we live. After what seemed like an eternity, he accepted the position at the Country Club of the South as the first assistant. This is a well-deserved promotion and we are so proud of him! Congratulations!!!

In response...

Perhaps my last posting raised a few eyebrows, and I must admit, that was the point. It did get me thinking about the safety of my own offspring when it comes to matters of his own innocence. There is a fine line between innocent nudity and pornography, and as an artist it is important to know the difference. Artists such as Sally Mann would be questioned more about her art in these times than she was when she photographed her small children nude in the early to mid-1990s.

You can go to this website to view all of the registered sex offenders in your area. You can search by zip code.

American Conservatism...

America never ceases to amaze me when it comes to its conservatism. This especially rings true when it comes to the viewing of the human body in its most natural form: nude. While searching for books illustrated by Maurice Sendak, the author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things are, this wonderful illustration of a young boy riding in a bread-dough airplane came up. This illustration is obviously not the controversial image to which this blog refers; but in the book, the young boy is awakened in the middle of the night and begins to float. While floating, his pajamas fall off and he remains nude for the vast majority of the story. When this book was first published in the 1970s, after the sexual revolution, librarians were painting diapers and drawing shorts on the boy in the book because some found a nude child to be obscene. According to Wikipedia, this book later went on to become #25 on the list of the most 100 most controversial books list because of the nudity. Now, I don't have a problem with people finding a nude child in a children's book as offensive. However, anyone with children know that most children enjoy the freedom of being clothes-free at any given moment in time. As a country that claims to have moved past the Victorian era view of the human form, I find that few Americans embrace how beautiful and innocent a child, in his most natural state, can be.