A Second Body of Work

While continuing, as always, to pursue the light on the land in my large-format landscape photography, I’ve also begun exploring other ways to bring light, form, and color together to create photo-based imagery.

These images start with a camera, although in most cases that is not apparent on first viewing. They are essentially non-objective (abstract). All are printed with archival pigment inks on Hahnemuhle Museum Etching paper, a lightly textured art paper that produces a seductive, velvety surface like a well made screen print. Most involve a series of variations on a central graphic element—an idea that was sparked a few years ago by my revisiting a poem by Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I have returned dozens of times to this poem since first coming under Stevens’ spell in college. It is a series of very short, haiku-like stanzas, each an enigmatic riff on the central image of a blackbird. The first reads:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Here’s the whole poem and some background on Stevens : https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/thirteen-ways-looking-blackbird