Photography Statement

Over the past several years, I've begun to exhibit my photographs . 'DreamDance,' images of a dancer collaged in dreamscapes, was shown in a solo exhibit at the Diane Farris Gallery in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last year in a solo exhibit at my home gallery in Los Angeles, the Jan Baum Gallery, I showed a group of sepia landscape images along with paintings. Also in a solo exhibition in October/November 2006 forty of my large scale portrait and landscape photographs were exhibited by one of the most respected publishers in Berlin, the Cornelson Publishing House. And, they are increasingly shown in international photographic juried shows.

Photography, especially portrait photography, is a new passion for me. As a classically trained, contemporary realist painter, my first and abiding love has been the portrait. I have been working professionally for over 35 years, exhibiting in galleries and museums throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe and have had over 50 solo shows and scores more group exhibitions. While there have been forays into other genres, my primary emphasis has been on the human visage and body. Bringing my hard-won skills as a portrait painter, mostly working from life, to my photographic portraits has been challenging and exciting. Now I feel ready to devote a great deal of my time to this end.

With my first digital Nikon Coolpix about seven years ago, I began to understand the value of the spontaneous instant, and how that could be sustained and transmuted into an image with depth and staying power in the way a painted portrait can. It wasn't until about three years ago, though, that I realized I could create images using a combination of my computer and my photography to become more and more seamless with my paintings.

In April of 2007, at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, I had a solo exhibit of fully integrated photographic and drawn images that I am calling 'Digital Drawings,' or 'Hybrids.' These are my most demanding undertakings yet technically and conceptually in this new medium. Combining images from my own paintings and photographs with images drawn directly on the computer screen, I aspire to achieve an aesthetic integrity and complexity that would be almost impossible in another medium.

I have recently resettled in Los Angeles full time. While I seem to have a special engagement with the very oldest and the very youngest of subjects, almost everyone has a unique quality that manifests itself in arresting portraits.

The Coast of Norway Statement

In August 2008, I embarked with my husband and my mother on a two-week roundtrip cruise along the Norwegian coast from Bergen to Kirkenes. We booked passage on Hurtigruten's MS Polarlys, a government-run cruise ship that presents passengers with the pleasures of a cruise vacation while the working vessel delivers mail and heavy equipment to towns along the way.
 
Traveling about 1500 miles north from Bergen, high into the Arctic Circle, we passed through the fiords and waterways of Norway, a stark, ever-changing landscape dominated by water, rock, and sky.  Colors were heightened by the clarity of the air, and the cloud formations were kaleidoscopic, constantly morphing the atmosphere.  At every turn, whether cruising through islands or on the open sea, whether raining or sparkling with jeweled sunlight, wherever my eyes fell suggested a primordial reality.  It is the landscape of the imagination come real, as vivid as the sensation of extreme temperature, pain or pleasure.

Originally, the landscape photographs I shot during the cruise were intended to serve as source materials for traditional paintings.  As a figurative painter, I want to remember accurately how things appear. My memory and imagination give me access to the emotional reconstruction of a place; a pencil and sketchbook or a camera are fundamental in retrieving the visual clues for representing the image itself.  On a moving vessel, pencil on paper has its limits.

With computer technology -- Adobe's wonderful Photoshop program for developing and transforming digital data into finished works, and the Wacom Cintique Tablet hardware -- I have been able to manipulate the initial photographic images as if they were drawings or, more aptly, the beginnings of a painting. That artistic process also satisfied my desire for visual realism and notation.
 
Once I sat back and saw these enhanced images on my computer, I could no longer view them as merely source material for paintings. They struck me as being complete painterly works. And so I have chosen to make them the final visual expression of my response to this unforgettably visual travel journey.

Remembering the good times is one of the great human pastimes and pleasures. Our vacations are the focus of our thoughts as much in retrospect as in the anticipation. We invest our souvenirs with characteristics of our own hearts. I believe that these photographs have become something more than this. They are an interpretation of what I saw in Norway imbued with the aesthetic control and emotional freedom that a lifetime of painting has given me.