Portfolio of Works

Tree Conversations

I love the ways in which trees appear to talk to each other, or to their surroundings. This has led me to imagine a conversation between trees, water and other elements to create a new world.

Light on Water

Water is an essential element of all forms of life.  Visually, it attracts our attention as it flows in oceans, lakes, ponds, rivers and streams. And what about puddles after the rain!   It has wonderful reflective properties.  In this series of abstracts, I capture the play of light on water.

In 2016, I embarked on a three-year collaborative project with Peter Large (drawings) to bring an artist's perspective to traces of earlier rural life in Eastern Ontario.  Our images told the stories of working people in their daily lives through images of their houses, barns, farm equipment, cheese factories, stone walls, and their churches and cemeteries.  Only my images are displayed here. In these images, my intention was to create a sense of things past, often with an unknown history and a sense of mystery.  I wanted to not only capture the texture of the subject in my images, but also to search for the texture of life in the past.  I chose to over-expose some of my images to suggest the eventual disintegration and disappearance of a building or piece of farm equipment into the landscape.

Codependencies is a series of portraits of the skeletons of broken shells.  Battered and worn by the Atlantic surf on the eastern coast of the US, these remnants of shells have been removed from their ocean context.  Now reflected on a field of dark glass, the images suggest a co-dependency and intimacy of relationship in this newly created context.

Tidal Remnants captures brief inter-tidal moments on the seashores of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.  The textural quality of the rocks and sand creates the background for macro and abstract compositions that last for only a few hours between the ocean tides.

Surfaces

The surfaces of old boats, tin rooves, and other metal objects, with their rough textures and patterns, inspired this series of abstract photographs.

These images record my fascination with the highly textured and often colourful surfaces of mature tree barks, rusting metal and old walls.  Many of the subjects have become sites for inscriptions, both formal and informal and sometimes multi-layered.  These human interventions in the aging materials record a moment in time and place, and reflect a story often unknown to us.

Tree Markers reflects my photographic journeys in Canada, England, the United States and Costa Rica.  The images explore the beauty of the colour, texture and markings on tree barks that record their passage through time.  Some of the images depict human-made marks where individuals have carved their initials, names or messages on the tree bark.  By doing so, these carvers have enshrined their own history with that of the chosen tree.  We wonder who these people were and why they chose to make their marks.

Scrape Me some Sky

Contemporary architecture, with it many glass surfaces that reflect the light and other nearby buildings, is recreating our urban landscapes. This is a collection of international architectural abstracts that I made in Paris, London and Toronto.

This collection includes my recent image-making in an abstract style, based on botanical subjects.

Distillations is an intimate and close-up photographic exploration of the essence of floral beauty, distilled into abstracted images of vibrant colour, intricate texture and intriguing patterns.  Inspired by perennial flowerbeds in some of the most famous gardens in England, these photographs capture a fleeting moment when the blossoms are at their most beautiful before their inevitable withering and death.

In Colour Play, I move further into the creation of abstract compositions.  Nature and landscape remain my inspiration but the sources of the images become obscure as I play with intensities of colour and circular lines.

In this collection, I continue to explore the ways in which close-up photography can be translated into abstract compositions.  The images ae mysterious, sometimes delicate and sometimes bold.  Colour, whether monochromatic, complementary or contrasting, is an important feature in these compositions.

This is an eclectic collection of images that in addition to more traditional landscapes also includes abstracted views.

Newfoundland and Labrador are places of subtle and vibrant colour.  It is a beautiful, but rugged land where picturesque small villages and towns hug the coastline.  Dominated by sky and ocean, they are subject to wind and epic storms but still seem to survive. 

If you would like to see more of these images, please go to the Book section of my website for details about my photography book called A Window on Newfoundland and Labrador.