As a teenager, I spent countless hours, between library stacks, pouring over and admiring the works of other photographers. Years later, while attending community college, I bought my first professional film camera (Pentax K1000). In 2000, I started using a Nikon Coolpix 950 to do street photography.
You can buy any of my images as prints. Contact me directly before my store is launched.
I still enjoy walking around city streets taking pictures but I also the enjoy nature and macro photography, the waterfront, highways, twilight and night photography, rain on wet surfaces, and faces on lampposts.
I also create videos documenting my explorations.
I love painting older faces. As we age, gravity, time and life leaves indelible traces on our skin. We start to look like our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents. It’s as if we travel back through time every time we look in the mirror.
The portrait gallery above chronicles my development with this medium including brief digressions and experiments that help to push my work in significant ways.
I am available for commissions so please contact me if you’d like to have a painting of yourself or a loved one. My paintings will be made available for online purchase soon.
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Home Down Under
If global financial theocracy continues their current level of domination, I feel these accommodations are manifest destiny for all but the rich. It makes me want to be rich but I fear that upon stepping over the golden threshold in to the domain of the endowed, I will lose all my empathy. Empathy is the only thing that the rich cannot afford. Does empathy even matter if I’m well off?
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Gas Prices
Sometimes it seems as if life is run on two molecules; methanol to fuel or cars and ethanol to shut off brain cells. Both however, can have deleterious effects when used in excess. These days, I’m very careful when using either on to alter the state of my life.
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Backboard
I try not to cling too tightly to illuminations from my past because they often lack details and context, and I’m not done seeing yet. The pigment in my eyes is graying with age but I don’t want my insights to grow old. Backlit subjects can always benefit from a bit of light in the foreground.
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Glowing Tree
This tree caught my eye because the branches glowed and tree branches only glow in stories. Before a certain age my imagination was off limits because there were no magical glowing trees or benevolent tricksters. It’s fertile ground now and I intend to spend the rest of my existence growing as many things there as I can imagine.
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Crown of Lights
For someone who doesn’t enjoy shopping, I derive a decent amount of pleasure from shopping for groceries for others. I tend to harbor very low expectations which can be easily satisfied when met.
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Light in the Tunnel
When it’s dark outside, the light is in the tunnel instead of at the end. Someone, because of my preference for sad music, called me a sad sack while I was 18 working at a liquor store in New Jersey. Even though they were using the term incorrectly, I knew what they meant. I was often depressed around that age but didn’t know it. I really believed that it was okay to always feel the way I did. After all, there were tons of popular songs written by people who seemed to feel the same way.
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Fast Food Wall
If I change my mind while in a drive-through line of a fast food restaurant, I don’t have a way to notify staff, change my order or, more importantly, get out of line.
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Raised Arms
Unhoused citizens, living in Oakland, often build structures beneath the freeways in neighborhoods, where the homes of other disenfranchised citizens were destroyed to build those freeways.
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Dark Tower
I was around eight years old when I first stepped into a tall, frighteningly swaying, apartment building. I remember darting to the window to see if the building was falling. Seven years of ferry crossings had not prepared me for a building that moved like a boat. As an adult, I learned the fear quelling facts about foundations and dampers, but I’m still unsettled every time I get into an elevator that goes higher than 4 floors.
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Supermarket
Supermarkets, franchises and chain stores would like us to see the benevolence of their convenience above everything else. Above all, they want to be benign monopolies. They claim to do good for us because they are big and can save us money but I’ve yet to save money while spending it.
