Artist Statement

When I scanned through twenty one thousand photos, culling them into a set of 1,366, and then ran them through seventy one single elimination tournaments, resulting in a Bradley-Terry ranking of each photo based on my personal sense of which feels better this is what I chose to show you. Thank you for the opportunity to put things before your eyes. My eyes come a little errored from the factory with my L cone shifted approximately 13nm towards the blue direction. What does that mean? My red-green differentiation is severely impaired, to about 5%. My artistic drive and need to create was not impaired though. Instead, I painted in colors that felt comfortable to me, black and white, and took photos of things that caught my eye. As you look closely you may notice that the paintings aren't only in black and white, they use translucency, specularity and depth to create new spectrums to play with on the canvas. In the pictures you may notice hardly anything red that is because to my eyes red is a dimmer color. I only perceive about 53% the amount of red light. But what I hope you notice are the special scenes that I was lucky enough to witness: a mushroom in bloom only for a day, a flower trying to attract early season pollinators before the tree canopy develops, a bear print dappled in dawn morning sunlight, and rock sculpted by flowing water.

I frequently shoot photographs with a 105mm lens. Others might tell you this is a "long" lens. I find it perfect. It creates that combination of background separation and image flattening that appears so abundantly in my images. It forces me to move about the space, to put my body in the position to capture the photo, sometimes leaning over a guardrail in a garden or crouched precariously low in frigid March water. That same constraint lets me know what will fit in frame before even raising a viewfinder to my eye.

I develop obsessions with particular locations. One year it'll be a slope of Mount Greylock and the next year where the bedrock rises out of the earth and the flow of Dunbar Brook carves swirling shapes and sorts rocks by size. I revisit the locations again and again. There when the leaves first fall to the forest floor. There again when the snow hides them away and packs them down. There after a late winter flood overruns the banks washing it all away, leaving roots in air and fresh earth exposed for brave spring ephemeral flowers. Learning new angles as my familiarity grows allows me to be present for when the light strikes an orchid blooming in a sandbar just right.

Composition plays an immensely important role in my photography. How the objects, shapes, and shades in a scene interact elevate a click of the shutter above just a file writing operation into a still life freezing a moment forever. The preservation of these moments is one of my great joys in taking photos.

I loathe a dry sunny day. The days when others decide to stay in with a cup of tea are my favorite to get out there. The way water and ice coats subjects, the soft lighting of an overcast sky, the droplets of a dew not yet burnt off all make up key components of my photographic look.

I prefer to leave photos minimally edited. I strive to capture my vision in camera. Mirrorless photography with its electronic viewfinder enables me to position out of focus elements as well as the in focus ones in a way that DSLRs or film before it never could.

I engage in these forms of creation that involve selection as a core component. With photography it is first choosing what to capture followed by choosing which capture among many. My painting process creates many works, stacks of paintings. So here too, I must select few from many. I have come to understand it as a two phase process of creation, there is the initial forming, and then a later choosing.

Painting is extremely process oriented for me. It is about an expression in the moment, an exploration of what unveils itself on the canvas rather than a goal driven destination. My preferred painting implement is a packing air packet that you might get in something you ordered online, a frequent occurrence in my loft. With the modulation of squeezing force the air packet can be either a soft dabbing tool for transferring paint and wrinkles or a firm swiping implement. It is both a precision tool and a cudgel for paint deposition, and I love it. I've tried all manner of painting implements, brushes of course, but also silicone basters, whisks, sticks, carefully rolled and frayed cardboard. Nothing beats a lowly air packet though.

Grayscale has felt comfortable to me. In the deficit of red green differentiation I have grown fondness for light dark contrasts as well as mottled gradients. My painting practice grew out of my drawing and charcoal endeavors, also almost exclusively black and white, so I never examined the black and white painting until the preparation for this show. I realized then that light and dark isn't the only spectrum I have explored in paint; I have played with texture, specularity, and translucency. Building depth and complexity in a realm other than color.