Artist Statement
I came to photography from painting, on a road that began with drawing and printmaking. Thirty-five years ago I took my first drawing class, with Michael Mazur at Brandeis University. I studied printmaking there, and in Paris, in 1975-76, at Atelier 17. I came home to become a painter, which I did, for almost 20 years. I have, for the last 10 years, thought of myself as a painter, only with a camera instead of a brush. At the outset of my life with a camera I worked mostly in black and white, exploring a sense of the ephemeral - extended moments, slowed, remembered time. I have returned, of late, to working in color. Not the alchemist’s color of an oil painter’s palette, colors of invented imagery, but rather a photographic one, using the colors of the given world and then either documenting or transforming them. It is through the view finder, the scanner or the computer screen, that I can now describe the world in chromatic terms. I think of my work at this point as a coming home of sorts. The image of more than 30 years ago that I consider essentially my first work as an artist, the one where I discover my voice, is one that thoroughly relates to the present work. There is a large image of my grandparents in this etching of 1973, melting into the background; the image of my father as a little boy, gripping a piece of chalk. And there is the landscape which runs through the entire print, branches winding their way through bodies, trees becoming windowsills, doorframes and columns. An unfolding of time, a story told. The figure, the natural world, combined, juxtaposed, all pushed together in a very personal picture plane.