About me
About me as an artist
I wander. For the creation of my art I wander in nature. For the expession of my art I wander the path of sharing my work within the language of art. Both are part of the same path and journey. One feeds the other, and the result is for you to experience.
As I wander in nature, the forms of what I see reach me first. Soon after come the colors. It is as if nature reaches out to hand me these forms and colors. The only response I can muster is gratitude and delight.
For me as an artist, the most compelling form is the line. In my wanderings I may see a line that leads to another and then another and suddenly there are forms made from these lines. The forms of the Southwest are the most compelling to me, the sandstone, rocks, the cactus and piñon, the arroyo and canyons, the grasses, the clay hills, the sky, and the clouds. The forms in the Southwest are easier for me, because the land is spacious and the skies welcoming.
The colors I love also come from there, 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 that allows me to carry them forward into my life. It is a sort of memory abbreviation. It is the way we all work, and I find commaraderie in that communion.
My work reflects this process as I combine multiple images into a composite of greater complexity yet one that breathes an invitation to explore. Simplicity for me is the experience of one person walking the face of this 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 speaks of this connection and its yearning for expression.
My biography as an artist
For most of my life I have been and to this day still am 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 image recording. I continued my film orientation as the family photographer and documentarian, producing representational photographs to share with others. As has became clear along the way, sharing 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 about about 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 there. During that 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 or representational photography 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. One could perhaps remove minor distracting elements in the image, like rocks and sticks poking into the composition. But the overall elements in the composition needed to be maintained. The image needed to be easily recognized as a photograph representing a realistic image of reality.
After that heretical thought entered my mind, I began to alter the forms of the elements in the image. I enjoyed 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.
Later 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 in the software tools available, 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 and 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 and 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 camera and the software tools available, and producing a tangible print.
As an artist, I must produce my own work. It is 99% AI and preset free!
The process of creating my art
My fieldwork is a basket-full of experiences. I enjoy the feel of a camera in my hands and the use of a viewfinder and shutter button. I love the feeling of focusing the image to only what I want to record with my camera.
My hands are familiar with the camera. It feels like a companion. It only asks me what I want to record. I walk and feel the lay of the land. I smell the aroma of the wind, dust, and plants. I feel the dryness of the wind. I know I am walking on the land. All this goes into the memory of each image that gets resurrected later.
I start by finding something in my surroundings that attracts me, and then focus my time on recording images related to that. It might be a particular color or form, a plant, lines in the rocks, the rocks themselves, the clouds, the water. For instance, I may focus on the lines in the rocks. I will find as many different lines in as many rocks and record as many different angles and compositions as I can. I will know I have reached the end of that session when I think, “I need to take just one more”.
I gather images to use later. Throughout my time in the field, I do not think about how I will use these images at a later time. I just enjoy being in nature, wandering and looking for the forms and colors in the world in front of me. A quiet dialogue with the land and sky leads me through each session in the field. I look to the land and sky to find a project on which to focus.
Afterwards I rarely look at the images for weeks to months. When time and inspiration allow, I start working with the images, looking for what can be created to express that remembered experience.
I work from memory, with all its correctness, mistakes, and fallacies.
I enter that creative space in response to what I see on the screen and bring back as a memory.
First I look at the forms in the image. Like a potter, I feel I must get my hands into it. I transform the forms into what I remember I was feeling. The colors comes next and connect the forms. That allows the image to speak more completely. From there only what cannot be put into words comes into play.
A simple experience may take months to fully develop into words, ideas, and lastly a print.
All this effort and search for meaning leads to one outcome, a print. My art is a print.
The rest I share here.