Artist Statement

I have always been puzzled by both the extraordinary beauty of the natural world and my sense of some other level of reality that shimmers behind the everyday as each moment unfolds. As I have become immersed in Buddhist and Jewish meditation practice in the last 30 years, that sense of something more has only deepened, and the world is often alight with that additional layer. I can choose to call it God, but I prefer to name it Mystery.

I take photographs because I am captured by the material features of the natural world as they cry out with insistent holiness even though they are also—and always—impermanent, transient, dissolving. Each form is temporary, mortal just as I am, whether the time scale is one of geologic eras or mere seconds as the light shifts. But when I can be simply present rather than lost in thoughts, everything reverberates with awesome glory.

My world is filled with specific creatures in constant transition, whether they are trees or rocks, and they are often mysterious, while all are sacred. My goal is to have you share my experience of a specific detail or scene at a specific moment in time, and so I use post-processing to make whatever changes will help you to see what my mind saw, rather than what the camera saw. A friend calls the art of bringing that about, “painting with Photoshop.”