About The Artist
My career in photography began in 1980 when I moved to New York City and answered an ad in the Village Voice for a photography studio. I got lucky and became an apprentice of Dan Demetriad, a master photographer and printer on 57th street. I learned studio photography and became a skilled black & white darkroom printer.
Outside of the studio, I photographed the streets of New York with my 35mm Nikon. I began printing my own work and became an expert in the technique of hand-coloring black & white photographs with oils. I fell in love with using vintage medium format cameras and began shooting still life and landscape. I started selling my work in New York, and later when I moved to Australia with my now husband.
When I settled in Marblehead in the late 1990s, I opened Washington Street Fine Art Photography, where I spent a decade shooting black & white portraits of local families. In the gallery, I exhibited my own work, and that of other east coast photographers.Since closing the gallery in 2008, I’ve moved my studio and dark room home.
My recent work has been in medium format color film. My last series, Wildwood, explored local environs close to my home.
My current series is of the gardens of Sissinghurst, Great Dixter, in Sussex, England, with an somewhat abstract immediacy, concentrating on form and texture. The large 30” x 30” finished prints create a visual immersion into the plants.
Black & White: these photographs all originate from b&w negative film. Archivally printed from the scanned negatives. Some silver prints are still available. The hand-coloring is done with photographic oil paint on a silver print.
Color: all color photographs are archival pigment prints from scanned color negative film.
Camera: vintage film cameras.
About The Photos
WILDWOOd
~Artist statement~
“I pondered, scrutinized and photographed the willow copse from all sides, from a distance as well as close up, and I could find no name for whatever it was that I found so lovely.” - from Esther Kinsky, “River”
The photographs in my latest series, Wildwood, were made on familiar land, in places I walk or drive by every day: woods, roadsides, swamps, fields and coastal scrub. The vegetation is not exotic or cultivated. Yet the beauty I see in these landscapes; the color and texture in weeds, grasses and brush, is more satisfying to my eye than a carefully planted botanical garden.
Returning to the same spots, day after day, the light always new, seasons beginning and slowly ebbing, countless paintings formed in my viewfinder. Being with my camera in these places, I felt an ineffable sense of serenity and joy.
March, 2020