Poetic

I developed my artistic style starting with a strong focus on creating landscape images. These images ranged from maritime to urban to industrial views. After moving into my own studio, I moved away from landscape images to feature floral and still life studies. By working in the controlled studio environment has allowed me to utilize my life experiences to input heart and soul into each image by experimenting with composition and lighting. In 2011, the oyster mushroom captured my imagination because of its bizarre and varied shape, alien texture, and intricate detail. More recently, I expanded the range of mushroom images to include wild varieties, such as the lobster, shiitake, and pine mushrooms. My creative vision is to use the mushroom’s bizarre and varied shape, alien textures, and intricate detail combined with lighting to present an abstract view that will engage the art collector’s and enthusiast’s imagination. I have taken a minimalist presentation against a square black background not to distract from the images powerful poetic voice. While it has been said that my mushroom images are reminiscent of Edward Weston's “Bell Pepper” series. I continue to develop my own artistic approach with subjects selected based on what speaks to me emotionally. While the artistic style has evolved to echo that of the Group f/64, I continue to experiment with different approaches, presenting new and innovative artwork. Rather than giving a separate title to each photograph, I number the images sequentially to allow the viewer to form their own interpretation of the photograph. For each mushroom image, five handcrafted silver gelatin prints are available. The images in the submission were shot on film between 2017 to 2019 and printed and released in 2021.