My mother believed in learning for the sheer joy of it. She offered each of her three children the opportunity to attend college and study whatever delighted them, free of debt. After that, we’d be on our own.

I chose the arts. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Arts, with a focus on large-scale oil painting and screen printing, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from the University of Colorado, Boulder. It was a powerfully creative and expansive time of life, and I am ever grateful for it.

I paid my mother’s gift forward. Through a career in public libraries, I worked to support equitable opportunity for all to learn for any and all reasons, including the sheer joy of it. After 25 years in that field, I had the great fortune to be able to step out of the working world, close the circle, and return to the arts.

I have always wanted to photographically capture images as well as paint them. In a time of ever-increasing complexity that is thundering in all directions at a breakneck and anxiety-producing pace, the art of photography gifts me with the time and space to stop, mindfully look, sensitively engage, and creatively capture images from the natural and made worlds through which I move.

I shoot a wide range of subjects – from the smallest pollen-encrusted native bee on vibrant purple Salvia to a potter’s hands coaxing clay into shape on a spinning wheel, from the ill-tempered but lovable Coonhound in the yard across the street to the age-wizened and sometimes forlorn face of my elderly mother, from a busker with his harmonica and upturned hat at the market to a shining October hunter’s moon over an island harbor.

I shoot what I find beautiful, what moves me, what frightens me, what breaks my heart, what enrages me, what delights me, what intrigues me and makes me wonder.

Each subject influences my photographic approach. Some subjects inspire intimacy; some ask for distance. Some like to be alone in the spotlight, others want company. They may be best defined by brilliant sunlight or sharp shadow, at rest or in motion, with crisp focus or soft edging. Some offer themselves openly, others don’t want to be fully revealed. Some want to be known as they are, others want to be dressed up a little. I try to treat each subject, and thus each image, as the individual it seems to me to be.

Through seeking a relationship with the subjects I shoot and, in a way, communicating on their behalf, I hope to honor, celebrate, elevate and visually offer each in a way that evokes a response of meaning. I hope some of them will matter as much to you as they do to me, and gift you with a moment of mindful connection that enhances the worlds through which you move.