About the Artist
As an army brat with an American father and a French mother, my childhood straddled two countries, two cultures, two languages. It was confusing going back and forth, and I was always the new kid, the outsider. Though shy, my curiosity kept me from being bored, and I became an eager observer of people and places. My family settled for several years near Orléans, and the chateaux, churches, and gardens along the Loire River became vivid landmarks in my life and inspiration for my art and writing.
I started photographing when I was ten, using a Kodak Brownie camera that had belonged to my French grandmother. After college I used a Zeiss Ikon that my father had purchased in Germany in the wake of World War II. This was the camera that started me on my studies in photography and photo printmaking in Rochester, New York, during the 1970s. A Hasselblad was my primary professional camera for years, but I now shoot digitally with a Nikon D810. Though I've experimented with painting and other printmaking techniques, photography remains the medium through which I create artist books and print multiples.
Drawn to natural forms (flowers, figures, fruit) and natural places (gardens, parks, woods), I am astonished by the ephemeral beauty that surrounds me every day. I wander with my camera, following the trail of light through the shadows. Sometimes the wandering is confined to my studio, but when I am looking through the lens—actively, intensely looking—I find stillness. This is what I attempt to transmit in my prints. My senses provide the starting point as I respond to color, texture, and form, but I'm searching for the mysterious quality that hovers just at the edge of seeing: the iridescence of a flower petal; the reflection of the sky in a floating leaf; the texture of a shadow on new snow. In my prints, I hope to create a “pause,” a moment when we connect what we see with gratitude that we are alive to see it.
May your inner eye
See through the surfaces
And glean the real presence
Of everything that meets you.
—John O'Donohue, "For the Senses"
Intrepid girl photographer
Still at it