Digital Photography

The Gaia Triptych is a self-portrait depicting Gaia or Mother Earth looking over and protecting her realm….It expresses my personal concerns about Climate Change and how it is affecting our environment and our lives.  

Botanicals Portfolio…Botanical Portraits  When I think of “botanicals”, drawings or studies of plants come to mind. In a way my photographic images of the Night Blooming Cereus is a study of light on a plant that only blooms at night. Typically, the plant blooms during the summer months usually around the time of a full moon. Though the moon light on the full blooms is quite lovely, I was curious about how another light source could heighten the drama of a blooming process that takes place over about half an hour to complete….from turgid bud to fully opened blossom the size of a dinner plate.  Using a digital camera I captured these beauties over several nights.

Landscapes Portfolio At the beginning of my art career, I was painting landscapes on the East Coast of Massachusetts and Maine. Gray-green skies dominated the landscapes. After moving to southern California, the landscape painting continued, showing the changes in atmosphere. Now using digital and film photography, I’m continuing to document the landscape and atmosphere here in Southern California and during my travels in Europe. Close to Home: Often the best images can be found in one’s own backyard. Lake Murray is only a few blocks away from my home/studio. Early morning at the lake is the best time to capture its uniqueness, especially when Nature participates by creating a veil of foggy mist. Then, that “other worldliness” becomes a part of the image. Farther away: White Mountains and the Ancient Bristlecone Pines: Above 11,000 feet the Bristlecone pines stand as centennials of time, witnesses to climate change, are subject to harsh elements. They continue to thrive where other plant life cannot. A testament to tenacity, these aged giants weather the extreme elements, continuing to grow infinitesimal every year. Many of the trees barely hang on to the shifting slopes of the Sierra Nevada, White Mountains area. In a surreal view, the Bristlecone pines in the Patriarch Grove appear to be cloud level, their branches holding up the sky.

Figurative Portfolio “Dancing to Abstraction” The body of work is about a group of contemporary dancers that I photographed over and eight-week period in their rehearsal studio in preparation for the production of “Cabaret Dances”, produced by Jean Isaacs San Diego Dance Theater.   I had begun photographing the dancers during their “Trolley Dances” in a conventional way.   As a painter, however, I wanted to photograph the dancers in a way that gives the feeling of painting. Jean’s dancers are so beautifully fluid in their movements that inspired me to capture that sensibility. Specifically, I was intrigued by the possibility of slowing down motion to the point of abstraction with the distortion of shape and color. The painting “Nude Descending a Staircase” by Marcel Duchamp was a painter’s attempt of showing motion in paint. It is the inspiration for this body of work. In a way I am doing the same, but coming from photography back to the feeling of painting. My earliest attempt to do this was a painting, “Dancer in a Landscape”.  The result has been a published book by the same name, “Dancing to Abstraction”.