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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What’s New?

Webbed, photograph
“We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”
- Madeleine L’Engle
I wonder whether artists 100 years ago found it easier to believe they were being creative in a unique way? These days it is so easy to see the art of others.
Thousands of individual websites, blogs, online galleries, social networking art [...]

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Mental Pollution

Backdoor, photograph
“Photographs, which cannot themselves explain anything, are inexhaustible invitations to deduction, speculation, and fantasy.”
- Susan Sontag
I’m reading Sontag’s seminal work “On Photography” and finding it thought provoking.
She is making a point here that our photograph-dominated culture has created a view of social reality that is a series of unrelated anecdotes, undermining a sense of [...]

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Man vs. Machine

Abstract I, photograph
“Anyone who can be replaced by a machine deserves to be.”
- Dennis Gunton
A visitor to my studio last weekend made the observation that photography had become much easier and faster with the advent of the computer and digital imaging.
Needless to say, I didn’t let that one pass…
Technology is usually an enabler, rarely an [...]

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Old School…

Crop Rows, Photograph
We just finished our first of two weekends of the Sonoma County Open Studio event, ARTrails – overall it was an interesting, rewarding and exhausting time! Above is one of the pieces I sold over the weekend, printed large on canvas. I was happy to see that my new “textured” work was well [...]

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All Too Familiar

Apochrypha, photograph
“Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China, or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.”
- Emerson
Well, that’s a relief, given that it’s unlikely that I’ll go to any of those places.
You see, I don’t like to travel, hate getting on planes, can’t [...]

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Feeling is Believing

Dead Soldiers, photograph
“Art that wants to be felt does not have the need to be admired.”
- Darby Bannard
This is part of a new series I’ve been working on this year titled “tactility” (yes, I know that’s not a real word). It is my photographic exploration of textures. I will be exhibiting a number of these [...]

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What Did You See?

“The person viewing your work has no idea what the scene really looked like, nor do they care…”
- Mike Svob
It certainly is true that no one who was not there with you really knows what you saw and, even if they were there, we all know that each of us sees differently. Given the same [...]

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