Illusions of Intimacy - PDF

I became drawn to, then seduced by the changing patterns of desert lands sculpted by the glancing light of the rising and setting sun: light that reveals forms molded both by millennial forces and yesterday’s cloudburst into undulations of shapes and colors. In response, I began what has become a 30-year long devotion not only to capturing in images those remarkable patterns and the rich history they encode, but to attempting the nearly impossible: via camera, paper, silver and ink, to evoke and perhaps recreate the powerful emotional responses that desert lands elicit in me. More recently, I have turned my attention from the macro- to micro- worlds: choosing to image fragments of the desert and seaside beaches that express in their quiet, understated way the same powerful combination of pattern, history and emotion as the grander landscape. Thus this combination of landscapes, sandscapes and sandstone. What I hope to create is what the late essayist Ellen Meloy described as a “geography of infinite cycles, of stolid pulses of emergence and subsidence, which, in terms geologic and human, is the story of the (earth) itself.” What I hope to re-create is what Meloy called the “calm of water”, the “spill of liquid silences”, and a “quality of light and color that pierces the heart.”