Natural Settings

Nature surrounds me. I live on twenty acres of pastures and trees. A small creek runs through the western side of my property and a little pond sits on the southern side. I am usually awakened by the sound of owls communicating to one another just outside my bedroom. My neighbor is a tree farmer, and adjacent to him rests a wild-life preserve, behind me is a horse stable. Most of my visitors are deer.

After living in urban areas most of my life, residing in this rural setting was no accident. It was a deliberate plan that I worked towards for years, as I’ve always had a very intimate and dynamic relationship with natural beauty. Consequently, natural landscapes have greatly influenced my photographic art.

I believe I owe much of my sensitivity to the natural environments around me to my maternal grandfather who was an avid naturalist. He would wake my sister and I up at dawn and take us on nature walks, pointing out flora and fauna to us, identifying bird calls, giving us tastes of eatable berries and leaves. And he taught us to do all this quietly so as not to scare away the woodland creatures, which we spotted and observed, from a respectful distance, quite often.

My Grandpa also taught me about the tides of the sea, how to detect them from afar by the scents in the wind, how to walk on barnacle-covered rocks without getting cut, how to swim in the sea for hours without ever tiring of it. As a child, I spent three months out of every year at my grandparent’s home. My visits there were most nurturing. Since then I have always associated being in nature with feeling safe and loved. I feel most comfortable in nature and seek it out often. In the outdoor images I take I attempt to communicate this. Most of them are shot on my own private property.

Only Ten Seconds

When I step in front of my camera to create a self-portrait, I have only ten seconds in which to reincarnate a feeling, convey a message, retell part of my personal history, or share hopes for my future. I never use a remote. I intentionally give myself only ten seconds because, in my experience, that has been the best way for me to give myself fully to the moment. I am able to suspend all thoughts and all efforts at achieving a pre-calculated result in the spontaneous urgency to create. I think I have always been happiest when engaging my creativity in this spontaneous way. It is what feels most natural to me. It is also very exciting.

The limited time seems to connect me with something beyond myself. My heart races as the timer on my camera ticks away. I inhale deeply and let my body move with the moment. It is in that very instant that I feel most alive! Almost as if my existence itself was tangibly nourished by expressing myself artistically. As if my art were food for my soul. Perhaps this would explain why I have always felt such intense urges to create!

Ever since I can remember I’ve sought to express myself, and share those expressions with others. The dialogue I have entered into with others as a result of my photography has been most rewarding. But it is also a dialogue that not only reaches out into the outside world, but it seeks to communicate within me as well. In creating self portraits I seek to enter into a rich dialogue with myself that excludes all judgements. It is raw and accepting, and it embraces everything I wish to express without first estimating it’s value. It is part of a total surrender to my creations, and it constantly challenges me to expand my comfort zones and just be myself! I create art to discover how much there really is to who I am. When I hear my camera’s ten second timer clicking away, the possibilities of what may manifest seem endless: like a whole galaxy being born from within me.

Uninhibitedly I continue to explore these uncharted regions of my being, and return from my journeys with little maps of the places I have explored. These maps are my photographs and I invite you to experience them.

My Masks

When I first begun creating self-portraits for public consumption, I wanted my photographs to show as many sides of myself as possible.I wanted to experience a full release of my being into my photographs. Ironically, the first items I purchased to ensure that this occur -even before I bought a tripod- were several masks. They were carnival masks reminiscent of those worn at the masquerade balls of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: a gold one with red feathers, a black velvety mask with beads dangling from it, and a little pierrot mask with a tear painted on it’s cheek. They were to serve me in achieving a certain liberating, playful anonymity of sorts.

Within this unidentifiable state, I wished to reveal more of my identity than I ever had before in public. With my face always hidden, I was certain I would be able to give myself fully to my self-portraits. I wanted to enter a world in which I would feel completely uninhibited, like the guests at Venetian balls, who danced as they never had before, in their elaborate disguises. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought, if I could capture my spirit dancing freely in my photographs?

Too many people already knew my face, in my life, and because of that, they mistakenly thought they knew me. My photographs, I hoped, would function as windows into vistas of myself that no one ever saw painted on my countenance. They would be glimpses into sides of me that lived beyond the superficiality of common sights, like my face. Or even common knowledge, like my name. So, along with the masks I chose a pseudonym of sorts for myself to complete the disguise, and twirled into the ballroom with wild abandon!