Artist’s Statement
I’ve spent most of my life making 'pictures' of one sort and another as a medical imaging scientist. Although my cameras were often exotic - many of which I designed - the end result was always the same, an image. Some of my “cameras” used x rays, sound, radio waves, electricity, or infrared. All my efforts attempted to reveal features of the human body, conveyed through an image.
Now I use more traditional cameras to record the light patterns that are reflected from the surface of subjects. While the technology differs, the goal of the pursuit is the same - to reveal the essence of the subject being studied, and to better understand the patterns revealed - whether for diagnostic or aesthetic purpose.
I live with my wife, Ana Maria, in Chapel Hill, NC.
Ana Maria's passion is growing plants, all kinds of plants, and toads and frogs, but that is a story for another time. One day a greenhouse appeared, and inspiration has flowered (so to speak) ever since. I have had the privilege of photographing some of her proteges, but not content with what I have captured, I have "embellished" what my wife and Mother Nature have wrought.
I knew them as "jelly fish" growing up near the Raritan Bay in New Jersey. They visited every summer and every summer I regretted swimming in their midst. They are referred to as "sea nettles" in coastal North Carolina where I now live. I had the good fortune of photographing a few at the Omaha Zoo a few years back, safe from their paralyzing stings. I present an array of representations of these amorphous creatures in this gallery.
Robert Mapplethorpe is the inspiration for this gallery. Although he is more recognized for a series of controversial, homoerotic photos, he has also produced a portfolio of flower portraits taken throughout his brief life, many of them in black and white. This is my modest homage to that work.
An aid to understanding a subject more completely is to render that subject from different perspectives, or with different color palates. Why not render several interpretations in a single image? This is the “why not” that has motivated me to make these images. I have exploited symmetry, spectral variation, and superposition to better present the essence of what I see. I hope these images give you as much pleasure viewing them as it brought me making them.