EDUCATION

B.A., Kirkland College, 1974
J.D., Boston University, 1977
M.F.A., Art Institute of Boston, Lesley University, 2005


ARTIST STATEMENT

I feel no need to seek out grand vistas or exotic locales, majestic mountain ranges or rushing rivers. It’s the common wooded landscape of my day to day life that captures my attention. Many of the images in my current work are from areas close to my home; others are from farther flung places, but places that I just happen to be for one prosaic reason or another. They are places that are generally more ordinary than spectacular.

By photographing the treed landscape with a purposefully oversized pinhole or a radically defocused lens, however, I capture it as it is not often seen. The images are firmly grounded in the natural world, a particular place, a particular season, a particular time. But by obscuring detail, only the strongest brush strokes emerge: the images become sketches with light, literally and figuratively. They tend to float between there and not there, to dissolve into abstraction and reconfigure themselves back into recognizable form.

I began this series when my father, then 83, started loosing both his sight and his memory. Strangely, the work has been comforting. Beauty, though fleeting and fragmentary, seems to console me.



ARTIST STATEMENT
Sea/Shore

My latest series, Sea/Shore, is based largely in areas where land and water meet. The pieces, which are diptychs, triptych or quads, begin with single or contemporaneously captured images shot with a very soft focus. I print selected segments of the image on thin Japanese Kozo paper, which I adhere to sanded acrylic panels with acrylic medium. The resulting pieces, generally in shades of blue, green, gray and white, resemble the sea glass that one often finds at the water’s edge.

The representational qualities stressed in traditional photography are repressed or subverted in this work. Both the blur and the segmentation of the pieces work against the descriptive nature of the medium. It is the more elusive and expressive qualities of photography that my work stresses. The pieces suggest or evoke, rather than document. Because viewers must fill in the detail, and the missing portions of traditional landscape imagery, there is a more active engagement with the work, more of an opportunity to re-experience remembered environments, forming emotional wholes from the fragments.

The work’s purposeful materiality and seductive surfaces enhance these visceral connections and elicit sense memories of times spent in similar environments.



PUBLIC & CORPORATE COLLECTIONS

Center for Photography at Woodstock Permanent Collection, Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, New York
Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Schenectady Museum, Schenectady, New York
Weill-Cornell Medical Center, New York
Banana Republic, New York, New York
Babcock and Brown, New York, New York
Vinson & Elkins, LLP, Houston, Texas
State Street Corporation, Boston, Massachusetts
Ayco Financial Services Corporation, Saratoga Springs, New York
Woodstock Inn, Woodstock, Vermont
Okemo Resort Corporation, Ludlow, Vermont
Spruce Mountain Lodge, Stowe, Vermont
Hudson Valley Community College, Troy, New York
Sheraton Hotel, Stockholm, Sweden