I grew up in suburbia, the middle of Nassau County, Long Island, New York, USA. As mundane as that could have been, I was exposed to fine art from an early age.  Summers were not spent playing little league baseball, but rather visiting the museums of New York city; MOMA, The Whitney, The Guggenheim, among others.  At the time, Abstraction and Surrealism were on the forefront of modern art.  What we learn at an early age, we tend to carry with us for the rest of our lives.  Neither my life as an artist nor my professional career have been a linear progression.  For the most part my professional career has been in education, with forays into construction and graphic design.  Similarly, my art has also taken a convoluted path with stops in watercolor, ceramics, and woodworking, finally settling in photography.  Now retired from full-time professional education, I continue to make art using photography as my medium.I have always been fascinated by the diversity in form, color, and structure of plants and flowers.   I find the different stages in the yearly cycle of a plant bring its own designs that are unique to each plant and flower.  Realizing every flower and plant is different, I began photographing flowers and plants from around my neighborhood for an ongoing collection I titled “Botanical  Portraits”.  Using portrait lighting techniques, I attempt to bring out the individual uniqueness in each of my “subjects”.

Professional Career:Like many artists and people in creative fields my career as an artist has not been a linear progression.  And, like many artists, my professional career has been a means to support my career as an artist.  However, in my professional career, I have been fortunate to be able to work in places where creativity is a requirement for the job.My professional life began as an art teacher in an elementary school then, for practical reasons, I became recertified in technology education (formally known as Industrial Arts – shop class).  I focused on graphic arts and wood working because I saw creative design as a large part of their foundation and a greater connection to art in general. As I’ve stated my career path has not been linear thus, after a few years teaching graphic arts in the shop department, I took about a fifteen-year hiatus from education, working in a variety of jobs from producing paste-ups in a greeting card company to finish carpenter.  I returned to education and taught cabinet making for ten years, finally moving back into the art department where I developed and implemented the current graphic design and digital photography curriculum.  I continued to teach digital photography at the high school level until recently retiring.Artistic Career:Early on, my personal work tended towards the surreal and abstract, using mixed media collage as a medium. My love and passion for photography started with the first photography course as an undergraduate.  I quickly realized there is art all around us, one just needs to see it, and with the use of film, I saw a way to create the kind of images my early collages could only approximate.  At different times in my professional career, I had access to a graphic arts darkroom complete with B&W enlargers and a process camera. During these times I started to develop a method of combining full size negatives to make reproducible images.  However, my non-linear career path did not allow me to continue investigating this method.  Going somewhat full circle, I started teaching graphic design and photography.  By this time, these areas had become completely digital and as I emersed myself in the technology I realized I could easily create, manipulate, and combine images in a way that even the best equipped darkroom would take hours or days to complete. 

Professional roles: Photographer, Teacher

Location: United States