Wednesday, March 14, 2012


Excuse me, I have to pet a dog.

Back again. The introductory stuff is out of the way for now, more or less, so let’s dive right in.

When I am out and about, which does not happen often, I carry a digital SLR and take photographs of anything that could possibly be turned into a piece of work. When in a hurry, say when walking the dog, an iPhone can do surprisingly well for my purposes too, although I often come back later with the serious rig and follow up on whatever it was that interested me.

Thanks to an inscrutable fate, I live in one of the toniest and most photogenic towns in the Northeast. The people here are enormously wealthy, or are doing a bang up job of faking it. I am neither enormously wealthy, nor anywhere near it. It simply happened that after World War II my dad got a house here with the help of a G.I. loan, and the town fathers have never yet succeeded in throwing me out.

Several beautiful parks are within easy walking range for the dog and me, and provide a good deal of material for my work. I am not terribly interested in dramatic panoramas; I like fields and stone walls and the more intimate nature of an inhabited landscape.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Trusting the Process.

It does seem strange; to get a scene to look like itself, I have to leave out a lot of it.

So what should I ruthlessly suppress? This one isn’t all that hard. You just keep experimenting until the drawing, painting, whatever, looks right. That is to say, until it looks right to me. This might be the point where the soul puts its oar in. After all, what looks like a good solution to a challenge is going to vary from person to person. Some quality in me, call it the soul or the brain or whatever you want, has to make the decision about the way my picture should look.

Hopefully some other people will agree with me about that, and even better, one of them might have some money burning a hole in their pocket.