My work as a photographer began years before I held my first camera. 

As a child I roamed the hills, canyons, mountains and deserts of California -- places my father adventured in search of the perfect trout stream.  The solitude I knew then sharpened my senses and taught me to see into the shadows and small places.  I felt a sense of belonging and comfort in the wilderness that years later conflicted with my life as a professional in urban Los Angeles.

Rune

This image suggests a fold in the earth, a warp or flux.  There is movement and transformation going on all of the time and we are part of it.  As with each flower, so do we contain a history of our past, present and future.  There is no stasis or death in Nature, only a circle of beginnings and transformations.

William Wordsworth wrote, "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." (from Lines Composed on the Road to Tintern Abbey). I was a young woman before I took my first camera into the Sierras.  The distance that had grown between me and the wild landscapes I wandered so freely as a child fell away and I was once again seeing and being one with the world around me.

I never thought of myself as an artist.  I took pictures simply and solely to suspend beauty, to express the deeper notes of a life wandering the back roads of the West, to be outside the exigencies of one life into the timeless fluidity of another.

It is no accident the word inspiration contains the word that also means breathe. As a photographer I need the feeling of wilderness to breathe, to slip into the cracks of consciousness where the natural world can be seen unedited and unadorned.

As my childhood places tamed or vanished, it took longer to get to more remote places and it was harder to let go of the noise and painful losses in my life.  Someone wrote that sadness separates a person from God.  So it was I began to notice barriers appearing in my images. A starkly barren bush pushed a wildflower into the background; a fallen tree blocked the view of light dappled water.

The Graces

Botticelli's Beauty, Restraint, and Pleasure are at play in this image.  At times of great stress, nature's gifts offer solace and hope.

A breakthrough came when I experimented with extreme macro photography.  I moved beyond the full frame close-up of a wildflower through form into a wilderness of surreal landscapes and color. The barriers stripped away and I became an extension of something larger, at once mystical and transcendent.  In The Ponds, May Sarton wrote, "I want to believe imperfections are nothing and that light is everything, more than the sum of each flower blossom rising and falling... and I do."

Wilderness continues to be my classroom, teacher and editor. At the invitation of a friend, I joined an arts critique group in 2001.  My first solo show, Where the Light Divides, was held at the Brand Gallery in Glendale, California during the summer of 2002. The show featured unfiltered 35mm color images of desert wildflowers printed on watercolor paper. 

ArtScene magazine recommended the show and referred to the images as "sumptuous abstractions... owing a strong sense of debt to earlier American Modernists such as Edward Weston." (ArtScene, July/August 2002)

Close

This image reveals the translucency between all living things.  When we penetrate the surfaces that separate, we end the loneliness and disconnection that feeds aggression and destruction.

A new collection of abstract images The Deepening Field continues my exploration into the worlds within worlds I find in nature.

I hope that my work brings grace and beauty to the world and that it helps forward our commitment to preserve wilderness.  It is increasingly rare to look at the sky without seeing the contrails from planes, to hear the pulse of the forest for the noise of our machines, to see birds, fish and animals in their natural habitat.

Wilderness is sustenance to our dreams and imagination.  A tame world lessens us and the world we leave to our children.

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