My Approach to Art:

 

My Polaris, my North Star that guides me through our New Dark Age, is Awe. The poet, W.B. Yeats said it best: “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow larger”. It's those “magic things” that create within me that sense of Beauty, Wonder, and Awe. 

 

I photograph not what I see, but what I feel. Objective reality for me is only the raw material. From that outer world experience, I try to express my inner response, through both photography and poetry.  Combining our external world experience with our inner, emotional response creates an amalgam, a fusion of both worlds. That amalgam, that interpretation, creates a new reality altogether. Call it synergy. It’s the same process as how the cocoa bean becomes chocolate, the grape becomes wine, or the heart of the agave becomes a fine mezcal. 

 

 Awe is everywhere. I find it from those magic things in Nature-our oceans and mountains and forests. I also find it in animals, and from the amazing Homo Sapien-us. We're all on this journey together, alive at the same time, all sharing our “one wild and precious life”, as the poet Mary Oliver called it. We're all one for a short time on this magnificent Blue Marble, interconnected, from the same litter, all star shards from an ancient blast, all muddling along the best we can.

 

I see artists and poets as Apostles of The Awe, whose mission is to remind ourselves that Beauty and Awe -those “magic things”- are everywhere, waiting to be discovered. I believe that gloom, like the dark, shivering side of the moon, always circles back to the eternal warm light of the sun.  

 

 

Bio 

 

B.A. - University of Denver, English Major

J.D.- Lewis and Clark College of Law, Portland Or.

Trial Lawyer in Oregon and Hawaii for 35 years

Long time Student of Buddhism and Martial Arts, with a Black Belt in Aikido. 

Multiple photography awards, with exhibitions in both the U.S. and Canada.

 

Favorites

 

Art quote: “You can look at some images for a week, and forget them, and you can look at other images for a second, and remember them the rest of your life”. Juan Miro 

Life quote: “ It’s not about you”. From Hospice volunteer training. 

Book: Don Quixote, Cervantes.

Movie: The Godfather Trilogy.

Destination: The next one.