The photographs on this website are a combination of traditional black and white, hand painted photographs, and my venture into digital photography.
The digital work is mostly abstract using color and movement. That is what appeals to me at this point in my photographic journey. I’ve always felt that you can understand a concept or experience an emotion, even spirituality, in abstract art. Kandinsky and Rothko felt the same. Russian expressionists felt that abstract, nonrepresentational art was the purest form of art.
Composition and the organization of space is a major factor when shooting my photographs, probably because of the artists and architects running through my family tree.
I don’t believe that sharpness is a necessary element in my images. I prefer to use techniques of movement and blur. You can achieve intriguing and surprising shapes and compositions using movement and selective focus. I like to use the aspect play when shooting - moving the camera or subject and alternating ISO speeds and exposure. The images often appear to have a watercolor quality, which appeals to me. The painter, Helen Frankenthaller, has been inspiration to me. Her combinations of colors and shapes are amazingly beautiful.
When I began taking photographs years ago, I painted directly on my black and white prints, often layering the colors. Years later, it appears that I’ve come full circle in that my images look like paintings again.
Previous Statement - Traditional Film images
My images have been described as softly surrealistic. Many of them portray a figure suspended in a kind of internalized landscape. The medium of photography has given me several techniques to illustrate the concepts I seek to express.
Layering images from different times and places enables me to create new images with meanings all their own. Negatives are chosen containing certain elements when printed together achieve a kind of visual metaphor, i.e. the depiction of a backbone superimposed on a figure, symbolizing both strength and vulnerability.
Movement is used as a technique to demonstrate impermanence and volatility in the world. I use blur in a photograph to reveal a sense of emotional intensity or spiritual presence. This results in pictures that are not necessarily pretty, but can actually be disturbing.
Place has become extremely important to me. Capturing the essence of an environment or object reveals an identity or place in time. It’s the underlying meanings that an image can provoke that interests me.
In general, my work concentrates on the spiritual and the abstract found in nature and in everyday, mundane environments.