As anyone who has been a regular reader of my online ramblings would know, I was always a bit of an outcast at school. My eccentric hobbies and interests didn’t really win me a whole lot of friends in the conservative, narrow-minded country towns I grew up in, and I suppose because of the way I was treated I developed a bit of a penchant for causing controversy, making people talk about me, and really pissing my clean-cut parents off.
I managed to really ruffle a lot of feathers when, at the young age of seventeen, I decided to do a body painting piece as my major practical assignment in twelfth grade art class. Even at that age I’d been fascinated with modelling, nudity and beauty, and I guess between my general interest in the subject and my desire to shock everyone in the town, I never really stopped to think how inappropriate it actually was.
So, I painted up some amazing heaven and hell themed backdrops on huge pieces of canvas, and painted my own semi-naked body as a devil and an angel and had the school’s photography teacher take some professional photos of me to frame and submit as my final piece. Looking back on it, it seems absurd that it never crossed my mind that maybe having a male teacher take photos of a seventeen year old student wearing nothing but paint and a g-string on school grounds wasn’t such a good idea, but I swear to you that it was totally innocent and for no purpose other than the creation of art.
A week before we were due to submit our final piece (which I should add made up something like 60% of our final grade), everything started to implode. I was called to the headmaster’s office, and told that despite the school being fully aware of the project I’d been working on for six months they had now decided it was “inappropriate for a school context” and that I was forbidden from submitting it. They also said that the photography teacher could possibly get in a LOT of strife for taking the photos, and that I had potentially caused a lot of trouble. The only person to stick up for me was my art teacher, who realised there was no way I would be able to start and complete a new project with only a week to the submission date, and with so much of my grade relying on what I’d already done she went to the state school board.
In the end, the state school board said that while it was extremely controversial and maybe inappropriate, it was still art and actually paled in comparison to some of the graphic anti-abortion/eating disorder/etc pieces that had been submitted, and they ruled in my favour. I think my saving grace was that the photos were taken only a few weeks before I turned 18, so maybe everyone just decided to pretend the photos had been taken a month or two later than they actually had been. So, I submitted my piece and received a relatively good grade.
I was, however, banned from ever showing any of my work at the end of year art exhibition and mine was the only piece omitted from our graduation display.
I still have some of the photos, but I can’t post them on here cos I’d probably get arrested for distributing kiddie porn… of myself? Yeah.
I guess I was destined to be a nude mode, hey?