Featured Gallery: Mountain Dusk

I'm fascinated by the idea that photography is painting with light. But I like to push it toward abstract edges, and so think a comparison with Pollack's abstract expressionism is interesting.

Pollack pulled the canvas off the easel and stretched it over the floor. Then he would stand over the canvas and drip paint onto with a stick, building up layer after layer of streaks until a rich and vibrant images emerged, which he titled "Lucifer" and "Lavender Mist" and "Converge."

But painting abstractly with light requires a different technique. Rather than a stationary canvas, I use a camera in motion, so that light races over the digital chip, producing streaks of color and movement, building up abstract images that resemble nothing of what I actually saw at the moment. It's using photography, a realistic art form, to find in the view what wasn't there -- not shapes or faces or even colors, but what may surprise.

These images were inspired by a trip down the mountain just as the setting sun was falling behind the mountains.