I am a multi-media artist in a Google it world. To stay grounded I keep my photography close to the earth while I allow my paintings to soar into abstraction, even psychedelic fantasy. Basically, I photograph where I live, where I go, and the people I meet. I meld these expressions by scanning some of my paintings directly and then layering them together with my own photographs to achieve a fresh picture space. I also blend these visual layers with my own musical compositions, employing digital tools that preceding artists could only dream of having. Such layering allows me to leave the tracks of creation which can take a viewer beyond their own experience to question my motivations.
My expressive paintings, my restrained photographs, my musical compositions, and the resultant fusion of these as digital video are each shaped and shaded by our times. While I am fascinated by plants growing against walls, my Native American roots incline me toward a meditational regard for the Earth and its beings. Our relationship to water is one of my ongoing themes. To communicate this interconnectedness, I create landscapes and seascapes in every medium, some as crepuscular orotones or intimate silver prints, others as large paintings or projectable videos.
I say I make conceptual photographs because I employ both antiquarian techniques and the most up to date digital tools to establish images which do not sit easily in time. Anonymous people, architecture, sculpture, and the continuum of books are frequent elements in my constructions; so is my urban garden. My sense of portraiture wants my subjects to reveal themselves over time, perhaps via multiple exposure or through a series of casual encounters. Such milieu portraits, whether a person or my San Francisco neighborhood, take years to complete. Terrabyte topographies are created. Time and passage become the motif.