About me – an artist

I wander. To create my art I wander in nature. To express myself I must use the language of art. It requires seeing nature in its wild and raw reality with the senses I have been given. Then that experience and emotion becomes art.

As I wander in nature, I see forms first. Soon after comes color. Nature reaches out to hand me these forms and colors. My only response is gratitude and delight. From this basic experience arises the worlds I construct and place on paper to share.

The most compelling form is the line. In my wanderings I may see a line that leads to another and then another and then suddenly there are forms. The forms of the Southwest are the most compelling to me – sandstone, rocks, the cactus and piñon, the arroyo and canyons, the grasses, the clay hills, the sky, and the clouds. Most compelling though is that each walk down an arroyo or through a canyon reminds me how old our earth is and how honored I am to be here.

I love the colors that come from here, the reds of the sandstone, the oranges of the the evening sky, the yellows of the land and rocks, the blues of the skies, and the sage and greens of many of the plants.

I receive so much from nature that I must combine experiences into a simpler memory, one that I can carry back to the studio. It is a sort of memory abbreviation. It is the way we all work, and I find camaraderie in that communion.

My work reflects this memory process, as I combine multiple images into a composite of greater complexity than from any one alone. Each exposure breathes an invitation to explore.

Simplicity is always the goal. It is an experience of walking the face of the earth, as has been done for millennia before. I follow in the steps of those many before me.

Through my time wandering in nature I feel more intensely a part of what was, what is, and what will become. My art also speaks of this connection and its yearning for expression.

About me- my bio as an artist

For most of my life I have been a practicing physician. But that is for another story and another time.

Episodes of creativity surfaced over the years but did not become a focus greater than a hobby until I began to seriously take the development of my photography as an art form.

As a teen I enjoyed taking pictures with a film camera. I even won a Denver Post photography award for a picture of a climber on an overhang. However I did not enjoy the darkroom and did not have art training. So I began taking pictures for family memories.

In the mid-1990’s I embraced the new digital photography, as it offered wonderful new possibilities to the film paradigm of photography. I continued my film orientation as the family photographer and documentarian, producing representational photographs to share with others. Sharing my work is vital to my life’s and artist’s vision.

Somewhere around 2005, I began to be aware of a desire to express something more in my photography. This was a very vague feeling for which words were lacking. What that something more was, was to be discovered over the next several decades.

Not able to go to art or photography school because of my primary profession, I turned to the internet and to local photo clubs to learn more.

After five years of listening to various internet pundits, I did not feel I had gotten anywhere in my pursuit of understanding or even expressing that something more. During this time I had spent several years in the competitive photo club world and since my images were never selected worthy of useful comment, I learned nothing. I was frustrated.

Quite randomly I came across an article by Alain Briot on the Luminous Landscape website, in which he stated that there is no competition in art, since art is made only by the artist, and the artist is his/her only competitor. I liked that idea, so in 2010 I took a workshop from Alain to find out what this pundit had to say in real life.

During the print review on that workshop, I shared a series of prints from Mammoth Hot Springs in Yellowstone National Park. He leaned forward and said, “There is something there…” I knew his comment was not necessarily about what I saw in the prints. I believed he could see something in my nascent work that I could not. I wanted to know what he saw and if it was related to the something more I needed to express.

After several years of listening to Alain and my other internet mentors, I found myself still a bit confused. I decided to follow only one voice. I left the internet and started following Alain’s teaching and advice.

At that point in my life I had been a practicing physician for decades, committed to the tenets of science, technology, and protocol. For my first few years with Alain, I knew that my professional training provided the basis for a good understanding of art. Unfortunately, that proved to be far from true.

So began a painful several years of unraveling the arrogance of my notions that any field could be mastered with the techniques and paradigms I had learned in medicine. To his credit, Alain remained honest in his opinions and teaching, and I began to slowly understand what being an artist meant and that I required a different way of thinking than I had used in medicine for so many years. It became slowly clear that I needed to consider this journey as a new profession. It would require me to learn a different language than the one with which I was most familiar.

From about 2012 until a peculiar winter night in 2018, I worked diligently to produce beautiful pictures of the landscape. I chose the landscape, because I had always been drawn to nature and found beauty, space, and freedom there. During this time I came to produce well composed and beautiful prints. I had achieved my desired goal of becoming a good photographer. Yet that lingering something more continued to raise its head in my thoughts and reflections.

“What more could I show and express?” I was clearly not satisfied.

On that aforementioned winter night in 2018, in the midst of processing an image from the Southwest US where there were many straight lines in the layers of sandstone, I had a heretical thought come into my mind. I heard, “I am tired of all these straight lines!”

It was a heretical thought, because at the time (and to this day) it reflected the standard orthodoxy in realistic and representational photography. This orthodoxy states that it is acceptable to alter the colors and contrast of an image to a minor extent but not to alter the basic forms of the elements in the image. The goal is to produce a realistic photograph of nature, albeit one that also had some aesthetic qualities to it. One could perhaps remove minor distracting elements in the image, like rocks and sticks poking into the composition. But the major elements in the composition needed to be maintained. The image needed to be easily recognized as a photograph representing a realistic image of reality. None of this frou-frou Photoshop business mind you.

What was most prized about photography was its ability to reproduce reality most accurately. I had just broken the golden rule of photography and the Spanish Photographic Inquisition was about to descend on my head and imprison me…or worse….take my camera!

After that heretical thought entered my mind, I began to alter the forms of the elements in my images. I began to enjoy its freedom and spontaneity. Yet I experienced a very real heretical feeling for a good 3-6 months. I felt I had betrayed the tenets of traditional landscape photography and had moved into a realm of photographic heresy.

Gradually I came to understand that I was beginning to move from the realm of representational photography into the realm of art. That was a significant point of departure in my work. I call it “leaving the res”. It was in essence leaving the reservation of commonly accepted ideas of what should come out of a camera.

Since that time I have worked steadily to become an artist who uses a camera, in essence, an artist photographer. This is not to say that I do not thoroughly enjoy being in the field, experiencing life in nature, recording images with a camera, processing them with software tools, and producing a print. I enjoy being a photographer and then taking my images and making something more of them.

From my experiences in nature and development as an artist, my art has emerged so I can now express that something more that was rattling around my insides for the past many decades.

I have left the reservation of traditional, representational landscape photography. I have been exploring new artistic frontiers provided by digital photography, which have previously been inadequately explored and explained. This has allowed an entirely new path in my work as well as newer ideas about being an artist and digital photographer.

My present work continues to evolve as I walk the path of exploring creativity from a camera, using the techniques offered by a digital workflow, and producing a tangible print.

Throughout this process I must produce my own work from capture to print and do so to share.