Light Ring Caress

Almost daily, I experiment with a random assortment of used art supplies that have accumulated in my studio. I toss bits and pieces of it onto my studio work table to see how it looks. If nothing grabs me then I shuffle them about or add more stuff or delete some and look again. In this process I’m merging random occurrence with conscious creation in pursuit of elegance within chaos. The resulting photographs provide an opportunity for viewers to embrace unpredictability within an approach that values intuition and expressionism… where serendipitous encounters channel risk in the experience of observing and honoring the historic art principle of ‘taking advantage of chance’. Cropping the photographs is my way of featuring their individual charisma and creating dynamic compositions of visual aesthetics. Further, I prefer a visual language that explores and refines the shallow picture plane and cropping accentuates that preference. The images highlight an ephemeral world that reflects upon something vulnerable while speaking to the very nature of our existence. Plus their visual appeal belies their chronicle of relentless change. My objective is to place the viewer in the moment with each image; to suspend them between imagination and reality thereby suggesting the unseen: those elemental phenomena we live by like vim, verve and oomph. By selecting and isolating settings from their context, I pull images from reality into vernacular abstraction. In this way, the photographs explore the relationship between impartial objects and personal perception, focusing on the subtleties that produce multiple layers of experience. Though my photography is considered abstract it is actually completely realistic. I use realism as a medium – as a means to record my personal non-verbal responses to what I see before me and how immersion in it makes me feel whole. I am primarily a romantic who through selective cropping of realistic images reveals my personal inner world of mystical experiences. To me the inescapable appeal of these images is immediate and expressive of spontaneous gestures that are based on insights gained from my many years of creating abstract art. Most contemporary photography has been occupied with recurrent narrative, political and gender-based themes… and probably always will be. When it turns inward to express beauty and visual aesthetic pleasure it usually drifts toward surrealism and fantasy, but still well within the representational genre. At the root of those creative processes is the sixth sense of instinctive intellectual drive. If flashes before our eyes, holds us and pulls us in and says ‘don’t miss this’. That trice is what abstract photography is all about. It goes directly toward ones inner thoughts, makes us pause and takes us beyond provocation and coincidence to a visual epistie that transcends our fundamental understanding of life. While chance runs counter to most people’s conceptions of art, it has been a vital component of it since its very beginning and the images I capture are evocative of that history. Except for minor modifications in contrast or hue the only computer processes applied to my photographs is the cleaning or cloning over of small distractive spots. Note: each image I create is limited to ten archival pigment prints per size, signed and numbered verso.