A New Body of Work
At Photo LA in January 2009 I introduced a new body of work. While continuing to pursue the light on the land as always, I’ve begun exploring other ways to bring light, form, and color together to create what I hope are evocative images. The first several pieces in this new series were well received at the Los Angeles show. Two of the larger ones sold off the wall and I was relieved to find that most people who have followed my landscape work applauded this expansion into new genres.
I have a notebook in which I have accumulated many more ideas and sketches. I am developing and releasing these in small editions as time permits. I showed several new pieces at Art Santa Fe in July. These new images start with a camera, although in most cases that is not apparent in the final work. They are essentially non-objective. 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 finely produced screen print. Most involve a series of variations on a central graphic element.
The idea for all of this was sparked a couple of years ago by my revisiting a poem by Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, that I have returned to dozens of times 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.
As a signature for the series, I made this brush painting with Japanese Sumi-e ink on textured paper. Click on the thumbnail for a larger view.
Here’s the whole poem and some background on Stevens : http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15746


