Artist's Statement

Sometime around 1999 I wandered, camera in hand, out of my painting studio and into the landscape, looking for some fresh inspiration for my abstract paintings. I was drawn to the local woods and streams, especially around the Mill River and Fitzgerald Lake. I have also spent time photographing in my own and other people’s gardens. I like to shoot close to home so that I can easily return to my subjects over time, taking advantage of the chance to get to know them well. Eventually I became more interested in the photos I was taking than in the paintings I was supposedly taking them for.

As a painter and printmaker, my work has been abstractly based on nature and natural forms, with a dreamlike quality to the color and somewhat dramatic compositions. As a photographer, these concerns show up transformed by the “reality” of the medium. It has been fascinating to make the adjustment from the essentially additive medium of painting, to the subtractive/selective mode to which the camera lends itself. It has been thrilling to reach for the playfulness that characterizes my paintings and drawings. I love to photograph on the edge of tension between realism and abstraction.

Many of the newest black and white photographs are taken with a digital infrared camera, which renders images from light that is just beyond the visible (to us) spectrum: Greens look white and skies are dark and dramatic.

In my newest color photographs I have returned to the studio and picked up brush, scissors, and drawing materials once again, incorporating hand-made work into still-life arrangements with found objects, flowers, and reflective surfaces. The tension between realism and abstraction is more pronounced than ever.

I print my work in limited editions and provide a signed certificate of authenticity with each one, which includes media and ink details, print longevity and care information. The black and white work is printed in Piezotone pigmented black and gray inks on acid-free 100 percent rag paper. The color images are printed in Epson Ultrachrome pigmented inks, also on acid-free 100 percent rag paper. Both these combinations have excellent longevity ratings and will hold their color for many decades under normal display conditions.