Every artist must at some point ask themselves…why do I really do this?  Why do I have to express myself in such an idiosyncratic way?  I’m a young artist who continually falls on his face with hit or miss gestures…but an indelible and youthful will to separate from the pack – I’m competitive and an incredibly harsh critic of my own work.  Yet photography remains fun, inspiring, my kindred spirit.

I unfortunately cannot create then suppress, which tells me at the end of the day, I don’t express for myself but again, for you.  Yes, the person reading this right now.  I need you so see my work, need you to experience the world through my eyes.  I need you to know my effort to create meaningful and lasting work is a wheel that spins tirelessly in my head.  If I could only let you see the colors I do, the subtleties – that’s what drives me…the pain to not pull someone right into my head at the moment I see fleeting beauty no matter how odd or obvious, obscure or obtuse.  I want you to experience visual and psychological truth the way I do.  It’s a completely self-serving venture and in many ways the irony remains my art aims for balance, an attempt to claim that my eyes can do just what I want others to do…enter another mind, another perspective and take in the beauty from the eyes of another – validating the outside world’s take on itself.

The Reaction

It’s what it is all about and all it will ever be about.  Whether it’s a car wreck, a touchdown, a masterpiece or a master piece of shit…I create for the reaction.  For at that very moment I am interacting, sharing, allowing a youthful soul to run around imagination and truth with another whether the conclusive thought is positive or negative, misconstrued or profound.

Maybe I should care about money more.  Maybe I should find it unacceptable that I’m okay not being a genius.  I am young and so is my art and encyclopedia of personal experience, but nothing feels better than watching someone react to my work – to see the subtle raise of their brow the moment the image takes shape and reveals itself to their eyes.  Then the suppressed grin when the conceptual poison, the meaning, has subverted a once empty cavity of experience and filled it with thought that had never been there before.  It makes me shiver just thinking about it.  Then the appreciation or criticism, both enliven me the same.  Whether my blood boils to defend or boils to purr over the affection of those who enjoy my creation, the endorphin is the same and it’s effect is will continue to unleash and inspire work forever and ever and ever.

Spirituality and subtlety of emotion make for duo rarely found to be in cahoots.   I’m not ashamed to say the underlying theme in all of my work is to capture the things in life we miss…to focus on the little things, to crop a vast landscape of imagery in an effort to find the leaf supporting the bead of water with the answer to our unfathomable, complex existence.  Each day I was able to repeat, but more importantly recreate a new vision simply by paying attention to what the sky had to say – the protective umbrella that illuminated the human playground, communicating its own linguistic expression of visual emotion.  I forged a deep connection to a spiritual voice I could speak to without saying a word.  It was as if I saw the moment when the sky assured all that is below that it came to be on account of the beauty latent within the unknown – offering all that roamed beneath the opportunity to explore in an attempt to know.  I simply feel the need to document, capture and allow the painfully communicative lines to seep into my heart and submerge it beneath a well of indescribable comfort – all that could never be answered with clarity as long as it beats on, but I will try with every photograph I take.

Life sometimes can be self-explanatory without self-explanation.  A spiritual state of mind can inflict upon a pair of eyes an ability to digest intense, unrelated light – involuntarily sentiment, the power to express faith…

…faith in the ground we walk on, the sea that surrounds us, the people that pass us by unaware, the answers without question, the intangible knowledge that we are surrounded by a beauty, however minute, worth recognizing and most importantly worth preserving.