I have always enjoyed making something out of something else. A neighbor was cleaning out and had a bunch of old books that she was tossing out. I thought it looked like a treasure trove for something, but I wasn’t sure what at that time. I experimented with different ways to fashion the books into something else: sketchbooks using the hard covers and binding in blank pages, writing blackout poetry, carving them into boxes, making paper wreaths from the pages, or carving the blocks of pages into sculptures. I have always enjoyed collage and began to play around with some of the more vibrant pages, “painting” other pictures out of the colors. I also explored using acrylic paint to do color washes on the pages with just text, but abandoned that, as I prefer the parameters of only using what I can find in my supply of old/found books. Orson Welles said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” I love this quote and have found it to be true over and over again. My creativity really kicks in when I have a finite number of possibilities to express myself.

Description text In my photography, I am drawn to “the frame” and specifically what’s inside and what’s outside of it. I shoot a lot of doors and windows because the in-situ frames attract me. The things you can see in them tell you a lot about the people who populate the homes/businesses they’re found in: reflections, what’s displayed on the windowsills, wear and tear, etc. The same with laundry lines. When I lived in NYC, I shot the same apartment building pretty much every day for almost a year, as the people on the top floor seemed to do laundry every day. You can tell a lot about people from how they hang their laundry. Amish washlines in Lancaster County, where I lived briefly, were a favorite subject; they are usually very neat and arranged by size. I’ve done a couple of collages depicting washlines.goes here

The German director Douglas Sirk is very influential to me in my photography and in my artwork. He’s a formalist and very meticulous in his use of color and mise en scene. Everything in the frame works toward the overall look; nothing is placed by chance or randomly, and I try to do the same in my work. My philosophy studies centered on aesthetic theory, but I can put it in a nutshell by citing Aristotle: he said that humans were essentially hard-wired to enjoy looking at pictures, and when we recognize similarities between what we see and what we are familiar with, that’s when art resonates and has an effect on the viewer. It’s so rewarding to me when someone relates to a piece I’ve created enough to want to live with it and look at it every day. It’s the highest compliment I can imagine.

I hope people take a second to look at things in a different way. Things that they are just throwing out or things that no longer serve their original purpose may be reborn as something new and exciting. The common phrase is “reduce, reuse, recycle,” but I think there’s another R in there: repurpose. Yes, books are recyclable, but I think they are more valuable as works of art. When I use a book, its utility is preserved forever in a new way.