About the series

 

This series, which is featured in my second book A Singing Wire, celebrates the powerful life force that flows through all things, what Hildegard von Bingen called viriditas or ‘greening’, though the irrepressible energy of life comes in countless colors and forms. Other traditions call this energy by names like prana, mana, qi, ki, elan vital, soul, consciousness, or the divine, but names count for little compared with the direct experience of connecting deeply with life. 

 

Many photographs in this series are close-up photographs of leaves from my yard, created not with a camera but with a flatbed scanner, which allows us to look at the leaves much closer than we usually could. By zooming in on extremely small parts of the leaves (often just 1/2” or 3/4”), whole new worlds unfold — green landscapes of infinite complexity, carpeted with delicate white stars.  There are imperfections too, such as the bites of insects,  and the spots of age, but even they are beautiful — essential parts of the harmonious whole.  Layer upon layer, the leaves rest in their harmonious embrace.

 

Other images in the series are more traditional photographs of flowers and plants, taken with my Hasselblad 205FCC camera, though often composing the photograph so that the subject takes up the entire frame, allowing it to become a universe of its own.

 

This series of photographs celebrates the lifeblood of nature, to which we must remain connected for both the Earth’s sake, and our own.  I am fortunate to live surrounded by wonderful ancient oak trees, and they have helped me to reconnect with nature.  By working so closely with the leaves, I have a newfound appreciation for the strength, wonder, and diversity of nature. Too often we don’t appreciate the beauty of the trees, or we only see the beauty of the whole tree.  There are more worlds of beauty waiting to be discovered in the leaves themselves.

 

I strive for a restrained feeling of grace and poise in these photographs, to reveal the mysterious beauty hidden inside the everyday.  The language I use is one of simple forms, curves, lines and textures, often low-contrast and monochromatic (here, only using shades of green, rather than black and white).  Like Harry Callahan and Ellsworth Kelly, I often favor asymmetrical arrangements and objects barely glimpsed in the margins as essential parts of the compositions, helping maintain the dynamic feeling of balance. Meanwhile, like the Abstract Expressionists I use a flattened two-dimensional space to further distinguish the world of the photograph from our ordinary world.

 

The photographs are printed as archival pigment prints on Hahnemuehle William Turner paper, available at 20” x 20”, 40” x 40”, and 58” x 58”.