Gallery Index

Fall Leaf

I recently talked to a retired chemist who took an interest in a book I was buying. He said that in chemistry they used something called perturbation theory, where you thump a thing to see what it does when it jiggles and bounces back to its natural state.

I suppose physicists do a similar thing when they smash atoms together to see how the particles break apart. That could be called destruction theory.

This happens in art as well. In destroying an image, you learn something about the nature of its components. Gerhard Richter scraped paintings until the original image no longer was recognizable, but was replaced by streaks of color down the canvas, which showed how the pigments that once formed a coherent image now interacted in a more chaotic state.

I've been working on a series called "Fall" in which I've taken images of leaves and destroyed their natural color values. In doing so, the resulting shapes and contexts have revealed something hidden about the leaf that I hadn't seen when creating the image.

SHORELINE AND HORIZON

When I stand on a shoreline and gaze toward the horizon, I feel complete. Sea, sand and sky are before me as amazing as any grace could be. My mind wanders into mystical realms. It dreams of heaven. My heart breathes salt in the wind. I connect with a formless beginning and an ever-retreating end. And when I close my eyes, the smooth washing waves pour over me.

Coral Stone

Many of the Catholic churches built in 1700-1800s on the island of Bohol were constructed using coral stone. Most sizeable towns along the coastal road have a church which is still in use, though weathering over a couple hundred years has eroded or stained the stones, creating strange patterns. A few of the watchtowers were also built with these types of stone and exhibit the same erosion patterns. In some cases where the churches were renovated, the stones were covered over with cement, but that has also eroded, revealing the coral stone beneath.

Rocks and Water

I've been searching for places where land meets water in a swath of beautiful white sand, places where land crashes into into the ocean with the violent fist of volcanic rock. I'm fascinated how water gives way to the rock but at the same time transforms it over time, smoothing it, giving it ripples, sharpening it into knife-like points. Most of these images were taken around the islands of Palawan, a remote tropical paradise. You can find isolated stretches of sand and enjoy the sun. But there are also places where you can explore expanses of rock formations that meet crystal clear ocean.

Stumps

I was walking in a community park close to the neighborhood where I was living in Virginia at the time. I began to notice how park management was clearing out the old trees, or sick and damaged ones. They would saw the trees close to the root and then leave the stumps there to rot. This had been going on probably since the land was bought to establish the park so many of the stumps showed considerable decay, creating patterns with cracks, fungi, and how leaves covered them in fall.

Shells in Sand

Wandering around lonely beaches in North Carolina and Delaware, usually early in the morning or just as the sun was departing for the day, I happened upon these shells in the sand. Many of them were eroded by the constant washing of water. Others were despersed and staged by crashing waves.

None of the images were posed by me in any way, nor did I touch or move any of the shells. They are exactly as I found them on the beach, and exactly as I left them.

Dancers on a nonexistent stage

The series began as a way to study figures in interaction. I allowed pieces of imagination to act out in my mind. I was interested in the interplay between what I could see in my mind that a figure could do, and then what I could realize on the computer screen, thus the concept of dancers on a nonexistent stage.

By filtering them in Photoshop, I was looking for the right emotional tone for each scene. I was imagining some ghostly, and at times horific distortions, that reveal internal struggles, rather than physical possibilities.

Tree, Sky and Shadow

Tree, Sky and Shadow was an attempt to catpure and transform my experience of walking in my local neighborhood where I was living in Virginia. I would walk in the evenings and sometimes the angle of the sun through the trees produced beautiful light and shadows. While the walk was a mundane activity, the memories of the trees now have deeper meaning for me. The images I see now are more my memory than what I saw when experiencing the world they are taken from.

The Insignificance of Space and Time to the Immaterial

The Insignificance of Space and Time to the Immaterial is a series of digital paintings created over the period of a few days. The idea was to see progress in the stages of development. Often, multiple versions of the same basic image emerged. Those versions became markers on a journey. As there are different versions of the same image, there are different versions of myself at different times.

I have a sense of lost time when creating. I get absorbed in the work because I enjoy seeing where it will lead. In that lost time, space expands, even though my actual workspace is cluttered.

The challenge both in life and art is always to become more human, deeper, more insightful than I was before, more connected with meaning greater than myself.

Sun, Sky and Cloud

Over the period of a year, I took pictures for the Sun, Sky and Shadow series from the roof of the building where I was working at the time. Mostly, the view was of railroad tracks and industrial warehouses. Early in the morning, or later in the evening when I stood out on the roof, the horizon and clouds would make me forget that I was at the edge of the city and that only a moment before, I was slaving away at my computer on the floors below.I also began to carry the camera with me and would snap off frames of the sky when I was driving or walking.

Wood, Stone and Flame

Wood, Stone and Flame is the longest running series of images I've compiled. It's a catch-all gallery for various nature and landscape images. I often find that when I'm out shooting for another series I will come across an object that will fit in this set of elemental juxtapositions.

Some images in the series were staged, or were objects taken out of context, such as the poplar leaf on the left. The images of flame were shot at an outdoor bonfire.

I am drawn to form and texture, whether the subject is solid, fuid or energectic. Form can be appreciated at a macro level, while texture often only reveals itself upon close inspection.

Dogs

At the beach, I was sitting on the sand to watch the sunset. A dog that lived at the resort came out to join me. He sat on the beach and faced the sunset. He scratched himself, but then faced the sun again. I thought he must be waiting for one of the boats to come in. But no boat came in. Only the sun. And then, the following day, he came out to the beach and did the same thing at sunset, followed by another of the resort dogs, and no boats were coming in. They were taking time to sit on the shore and look at the sunset.