The transition from painter to photographer evolved from laziness, where today it is a heartened effort. Over the years, I have discovered enough photographic compositions in my everyday life that I would otherwise spend hours articulating with paint on canvas. My search for that everyday masterpiece continues and I am confident it is just around the corner from where I live.
Conceptually, my current body of work evokes curiosity through close examination of everyday surfaces. The images elevate discarded remnants, residue of experience, and heighten evidence of decay due to the passage of time. What is captured can contain information inherent in the present moment as a document, reflective of history, abrasion and dissolution created by happenstance.
Some of the imagery suggests adaptation to extreme conditions as well as an empirical suggestion of human attempts at permanence. Much like the brain’s function to make sense and order reality, the images pursue the in-between spaces of objective perception and the unknown. The viewer is invited to stay with the image’s inconclusive details, to experience the wonder of senselessness amidst our shared delusion of order, rationality and common sense. Like a figure coming slowly into focus, my wish is for the viewer to not hasten a resolution but rather, live in a space of uncertainty.
Inspiration for my abstracted digital photography comes from personal history, service as a fire-team leader in a high-performance military unit in the mid 1980’s and the hidden wars fought under the auspices of special operations in the Global War on Terror. My art process represents an effort to objectify how I experience the world differently and more intimately since military service. Using some of the same skills acquired as a soldier, today I look for relationships and visual interchanges that otherwise would escape me: it is the way a fence obscures some colorful junk in someone’s backyard. It could be the way various surfaces come together. It may even be found on the side of a dumpster, in painted out graffiti or rust on a car.
As I learn about myself through digital photography, I realize one truth: art, the actual object that art is, becomes much more than the limited version which hangs on walls and lives in museums. Art becomes the very fabric of our shared reality. This understanding provides a faith in the creative process, faith in myself and faith in the human organism. A personal goal is to help others see that art exists close at hand, to pay attention, to appreciate the inevitability of decay, even death… and to love the process.
For more immediate and less polished image captures check out my Instagram account!
