I can’t remember a time when I didn’t draw…making marks on paper with crayons, pencils, charcoal, pastels. I can remember the time when I first had a camera in my hands—at age ten, a Girl Scout Brownie camera and then in art school, a 35mm Mamiya Sekor SLR. Together, my love of drawing and photography have brought about the work in this show.

It happens like this—a landscape, whether rural or urban—catches my eye and the viewfinder of my camera enables me to compose shapes, light and shadow that configure in a moment that is, in most cases, ephemeral. A photograph taken at dusk, for example, would not appear the same the next morning—because, in addition to what exists physically, there is something unseen but felt--a mood, a sensation that can make what is ordinary special—something I can bring to the attention of others.

These pictures—I call them drawings rather than paintings in pastel—are on black Arches paper for a couple of reasons. The large size of the paper is appropriate for my landscapes—it gives the viewer an immediacy with the subject—it shows “how big life is”--a line I heard recently. And the black paper intensifies the color of the dry pastel so the work is identifiably graphic—not photographic. The pastels can flourish and be beautiful on black Arches even if the subject is not.

As of August this year, I will have lived in the Northeast for thirty years. I came from the Midwest where I was an art student—four years at the University of Nebraska where I also earned a teaching certificate. I worked for a commercial photographer for two years and then put my teaching certificate to use in the Omaha Public Schools. In 1977, my family and I  moved to Wichita, Kansas, and there I received an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Wichita State University. Since moving east I’ve lived in Ithaca and for a little over a decade in the Boston area where I’ve shown my work in several galleries there. 

One more thing—I must emphasize the Midwest has been crucial to my way of seeing. Landscape I’ve heard cynically described as “the middle of nowhere” is, to me, anything but—its terrain goes beyond “the pretty” of traditional landscape. Its expansive shapes, its often monochromatic colors, its light and the components of modern life—signs, utility poles and wires, painted lines on pavement—show us—artist and viewer—representations of modern life.