Artist’s Statement
My art often ventures into the abstract. While my early work included photojournalism, I found my calling in photographing color water reflections— work which ranged from impressionistic to representational. Later with the help of workshops at Jacob's Pillow and with Karin Rosenthal, I branched into dance and movement photography and the human form in nature.
My most recent work explores true abstractions in nature, especially in water reflections with their constantly changing shapes and patterns. Light, reflected off the surface of water, creates a myriad of changing images. Still water yields a realistic, mirror-like picture, but seconds later a ripple appears, transforming the surface into an impressionistic scene, a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors.
These patterns appear throughout nature — in ice, rock formations, trees, beach erosion, sand dunes, glaciers, and canyons— drawing my photographic eye to them. Often a moment of revelation happens when the viewer realizes the same patterns that occur in stream ripples occur in the petrified sand of a canyon wall. The forces of nature paint the same pictures over and over, regardless of whether it be on mountain, river, ocean, ice, or sand— always changing, but with an underlying motif.
I am also fascinated by seeing something very large in something small, and how patterns repeat on larger and larger scales: the crest of a ripple, the crest of a wave, the crest of a mountain. Some of my images display tree reflections, whose patterns grow more and more fractal the more you zoom into them, sweeping us up in a world of illusion and change. What are we looking at? Where is the boundary between a stream of water and a stream of air, or a cosmic stream, revealing to us distant nebulae?
In the end, I wish to communicate some of my own insight to viewers—and some of my process as well, slowing the viewer down enough to see what can be found in the tiny and mundane details surrounding us.