Artist Statement

There is something about the camera that brings me into focus.  Yet my journey into art didn’t begin here.  All my initial energy, interests and vision were in painting, a practice that enveloped me in a tactile reality.  The metamorphosis into a photographic practice began with the need to document my paintings.  This induced me to take photography classes which at that time were in film (not so long ago but of another era).  As someone who defined myself as requiring the light and air that surrounded me when I painted, I was startled to discover a creative jolt when images revealed themselves to me in the darkroom.  However I continued to use photography solely as a documentary tool.

One year my mother gave me original pages of Gregorian chants from a manuscript of 18th century Spain.  I became absorbed in a project using these pages with encaustic and gold.  I began to notice the beauty of the worn pages carelessly juxtaposed in different combinations.  A photographic project was born.

I think of myself now as a visual artist exploring the photographic realm.  Many of my sensibilities in this realm have been influenced by ideas, philosophies and techniques of painters.  Two seminal influences are Gauguin and Kandinsky.  Gauguin manifested images as he perceived the outer world with his inner eye.  His use of ‘symbolism’ transformed the literal by infusing it with feeling. Kandinsky in his writings described a phenomena of ‘resonance’.......that the artist was led to recognize the final image of that which wants to emerge into the outer world.  

These concepts are fundamental to my aesthetic practice in photography.

There are various other painters who have affected my practice and one in particular who I will mention an affinity with.  Giorgi Morandi was a modern painter well-loved in his Italian homeland.  What inspires me about Morandi is not his technique as much as his choice to concentrate on his personal environment in landscape and still-life.  Like Morandi, my photographs are taken from my everyday life, physical and psychological.  They are seen from my inner eye and selected through a process of resonance.  Beginning from this space while learning and using  the techniques of the digital era, I present these photographs.