About

Create art.  Look at art.  Enjoy your life. 

Self-Portraits: Then and Now

Create | Bring into Being

I love the feel of a camera in my hands.


I grew up taking pictures in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the company of artists, musicians and journalists.



After twenty plus years as an internationally traveled and published photojournalist I am now an educator. While I still work as a documentary photographer, I have also developed an abstract vision.  Please see Evolution for more on these transitions.

I also enjoy teaching the Zentangle® drawing method.

Look | Sensory Inspiration

My jazz critic father sometimes took us kids along when covering concerts.  I was around ten, standing a few feet from the Count Basie Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City.  While the rhythm section chugged along with soulful precision during the opening number, Mr. Basie gently tickled the ivories.  Suddenly, all the trumpets, trombones and saxophones blared, causing me to step back in surprise and opening my eyes to the power of big band jazz.

Music, art, a delicious meal, culture, the beauties of nature, a dip in cold water, simply light itself, all inspire my creativity.

I wish I could go back to the 1920's and talk art with American-born German painter Lyonel Feininger.  His style of using multiple planes simultaneously to portray the essence of a subject has inspired me to do the same.  I look at his paintings and swoon.
  
Enjoy | Delight in Life

The ultimate satisfaction from a lifetime of creating art and finding inspiration is the awareness that most everything around me can be considered art and has inherent value.  I hear music in water dripping down a drain.  Freshly painted crosswalk lines evoke Sol LeWitt's wall drawings.  Eating a sandwich can be a journey.

I live in Western Massachusetts, where I enjoy watching the corn grow.

Details:

I was first published nationally at age 13. While attending Phillips Academy, Andover, I gained a foundation in black & white printing and how to see light.

Art, literature, photography and communication were major components of my studies at Stanford University.  Within years of graduating from Stanford in 1983 with an International Relations degree, I began circling the globe, covering stories ranging from political and social change in South Korea to the underground arts scene in the Soviet Union.  My photojournalistic images have been published in magazines such as Time, Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, as well as in publications around the world.

As a corporate photographer in the mid-90's, I photographed annual reports and brochures for biotech companies and banks.  My personal work during this period included a three year black and white study of the changing seasons at Thoreau’s Walden Pond.

The Christian Science Monitor hired me in 1997.  I worked there as a photographer, writer, photo editor and blog author.  Deciding it was time to share my accumulated photographic knowledge, I joined the faculty at Hallmark Institute of Photography in 2006.

At Hallmark (no relation to the greeting card company), the environment was a stimulating mix of enthusiastic students, creative colleagues and diverse visiting artists.  My reality-based abstractions - a radical departure from past photojournalistic work - emerged from this supportive and fertile place.

I left Hallmark in 2011 to pursue a Masters of Education in Arts Education at Fitchburg State University.  I am now an Assistant Professor of Communication at American International College (Springfield, MA), where I developed a Visual and Digital Arts Major.  I am also a Certified Zentangle Teacher.