The Artist as Mad Scientist

self portrait #23, photograph
“Life is ‘trying things to see if they work.’”
- Ray Bradbury
An equally apt definition of artistic creativity. Experimenting with your art is essential to keeping it alive and interesting, to yourself and others.
Some people are relentless experimenters – they’ll try anything and everything. Others seem reluctant to venture too far from their [...]

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It’s a Love/Hate Kind of Thing…

your grandfather’s barbershop, photograph
“Here’s the interesting thing about HDR images – a lot of photographers seem to dislike them, it’s a love it or hate it kind of thing, sadly. But the general public, the non-photographers out there, love them. And we should be asking why.”
- David DuChemin
This is an interesting observation from a well-known [...]

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If Truth be Told

lines, photograph
“That’s part of what I love about abstracts.It’s not the symbolism; it’s not the metaphor. It’s the simple chord of tonalities… Such tones just make the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.”
- Brooks Jensen
I also love abstraction but have sort of a love-hate relationship with it. The quote from Jensen [...]

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The New Medium for Art

Weight of Time Passed, photograph
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”
- Stewart Brand
I spend most of my day looking at paintings and photography on a computer monitor and have been researching various aspects of publishing artwork, both online and in more traditional mediums.
It [...]

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Inductive Creativity

well travelled, photograph
“One does not stand still looking for a path. One walks; and as one walks, a path comes into being.”
- Mas Kodani
Often as artists we reach a standstill when we feel we’ve lost our way.
One tendency is to stop working because we know that what we’re doing is not right for us. We [...]

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I’m the Decider

calla 2, photograph
“Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
- Howard Aiken
One of the most important phases in the process of making art is that of editing. By this I mean the decision what to do with a new work. I’m intentionally skipping past the prior step, which is [...]

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Out with the Old and In with the New

The Weary Traveller, photograph
“People are very open-minded about new things – as long as they’re exactly like the old ones.”
- Charles F. Kettering
There is a new wave of innovation going on in the photography world known as HDR – stands for High Dynamic Range. I won’t bore you with the technical details. The reason I [...]

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Choose Your Weapon

Enflamed, photograph
“If Velasquez were born today, he would be a photographer and not a painter.”
- George Bernard Shaw
I wonder whether painters from long ago would have chosen different, not-then-available art mediums. It’s curious to contemplate what kind of photographs Rembrandt or Vermeer might have taken had the camera rather than the brush been their chosen [...]

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Visiting Old Friends

Shadowed, photograph
“No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.”
- George Eliot
I’m very aware of this statement with regard to literature – books I found compelling, even life changing, 30 years ago when I first read them can seem curiously [...]

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The Broken Mirror

Boxed In, photograph
“A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passing of time it’s moorings become unstuck.”
- Susan Sontag
More thoughts inspired by On Photography by Susan Sontag…
Sontag talks about the discreteness of a photograph and the effect of that on how we see things. Photographs become untethered from the stream of time they came from. [...]

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