ABOUT
It is clouds that populate “the landscape of my dreams.” They are my obsession, one I work to capture and share in photographs, drawings, paintings, monotypes. While other subjects distract me from time to time – flowers, chairs, people, landscapes – clouds come first.
Before moving to Naples, Florida from New England, I painted and made monotypes of imaginary cloudscapes. When I got to southwest Florida, those dreams became reality. Mornings and evenings I am out walking – often for hours – obsessed with the storm and humidity driven cloud formations that arise, most especially in the summer months.
In order to best capture what I witness, I often trade my paint brushes, pencils and charcoal for a camera.
I collected a selection of my first couple years of cloud “harvests” into a book, Clouds of Old Naples. That was step one. But I kept imagining bringing my clouds indoors, and as life-size as possible. By chance, I discovered a firm in Germany which uses a state-of-the-art, 7-color printing method to produce images on dibond aluminum. The result (hard to capture in a photo) are highly luminous, color-saturated works of art with durable, reflection-free, matte surfaces. Some of my cloud photographs on aluminum measure four feet square – or even larger.
No matter where I travel, I am constantly scanning the sky in search of cloudscapes. I am a member of the U.K. based Cloud Appreciation Society which has featured my cloud photos and paintings on its website. In 2022, I left Florida for the Berkshires in Massachusetts where I continue making photographs, paintings, drawings and prints.
There is at the back of every artist’s mind something like a pattern and a type of architecture. The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery. It is a thing like the landscape of his dreams; the sort of world he would like to make or in which he would like to wander…