I just received confirmation that Soul Mates has been chosen to be a part of the 24th annual Juried Photography Show at the State of the Art Gallery in Ithaca, NY. This show will be open from Wednesday, February 27 through Sunday, March 31, 2013 with an opening reception on Friday, March 1 from 5pm - 8pm.

Soul Mates (edition of 5) is a 24 x 24 inch archival aluminum print that features two mirror image Peruvian Grasshoppers (Lophacris cristata) and was created in 2012 as a part of the Entomos series. It is an image that reflects the idea of having a perfect bond with another being.  It is also a symbol of positive energy.

In China, the grasshopper is a symbol of luck and has long been a symbol associated with longevity, happiness, good health, good luck, wealth, abundance, fertility and virtue. In Ancient Greece the grasshopper is a status symbol. Athenians would adorn themselves with golden grasshopper hair combs and brooches as an indication of nobility. The grasshopper is also a symbol of immortality as we see in Greek myth when Zeus grants immortality to Tithonus, who was later transformed into a grasshopper (who of course, lived forever).  In Native American tribal lore (specifically the Iroquois nation) grasshopper symbolism deals with messages of glad tiding. In this context, the grasshopper is a harbinger of good news. Indeed, when this creature is seen on spirit walks, it is a sign that the seer will receive profoundly joyful news that will benefit the entire community.  As an animal totem, the grasshopper appeals to artists, musicians and dancers. 

I'm honored to be included in the juried SOAG show.  The annual photography show is always filled with high quality work from the best photographers in New York State.  If you are in Ithaca during the show, have a look.  You won't be disappointed.

During the summer of 2010 I was in Washington, D.C and happened to go to one of my favorite places in DC, Arlington National Cemetery.  I've been to Arlington many times.  I love to watch the guard change at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  I love the rambling paths that wander through the cemetery.  It's a very peaceful place.  On this particular occasion I took the time to step inside the little military museum behind the Tomb of the Unknowns.  On that day the idea for this series of work, Common Valor, was born.

The museum had case after case of military medals on display.  I had never really taken the time to appreciate all of the different medals.  I saw the ones we all know, The Purple Heart, The Bronze Star, various achievement medals, service medals, marksman medals and so on.  There are literally hundreds of medals and new ones are added occasionally.  The medals mark achievements, sacrifices and service.  As I stood browsing the cases I thought about how wonderful it was that servicemen and women are honored for their duty in this way.  

This idea began to spiral inside my head and I thought about ordinary citizens experiencing the trials and tribulations of every day life.  I had just lost my father in the late spring of the same year.  I thought about how difficult that experience was, and that as hard as it was, there wasn't a medal for that.  There wasn't a medal for nursing a sick family member, raising a child, enduring a divorce or painful break-up, nor was there a medal for surviving abuse, a serious illness or overcoming any of life's many difficulties.  In this world of trophies for sports participation and service awards for career work, there was no object that marked earning your stripes for emotional life experiences.

It's strange how my artistic ideas begin.  In that moment, I felt like one of life's ordinary wounded warriors.  I thought about people and the everyday common valor, exemplified in each life, well-lived.  I made a note of those fleeting thoughts in my phone notes and there it sat, and sat and sat.  

Fast forward to the summer of 2011 and a trip to London, England.  If you've ever been there you know that England is all about it's Royals.  We did the tourist thing and visited the various castles, cathedrals and monuments.  One of the places we stopped  was the famous Tower of London, home of the Crown Jewels and site of the beheading of many of the wives of Henry VIII.  There they also have a military museum full of British medals.  I was immediately reminded of my idea.  

Now when an idea for artwork keeps coming back like that, eventually you have to act on it.  During the summer of 2012 the work on the medal series known as Common Valor finally began. By this time I had a number of sketches of various ideas.  Those first four medals were a part of my Sticks and Stones and Bits of Bone solo show at Mansfield University in August-September.  The first three actually were made of those three items, the fourth with barbed wire.  Recently I've completed four more in this series:  Collateral Damage (shown above), Wounded Heart, Mourning and Finding Direction.  I believe there will be more. This idea just keeps growing.   Each of these medals explores a certain dynamic of the human condition.  Each is meant to commemorate an important event in our lives as we maneuver through this one human life.  They honor struggle, commitments, loss and overcoming.  They are made with respect for the militaries and service men and women of the world that have inspired them.  They are meant for the people of this ordinary life who carry inside of us a common valor and serve as a reminder of the hero inside all of us.  

Eight of these medals will be part of FORWARD at Exhibit A in Corning, NY which opens on March 2nd.  I hope you will join us for the show and see my homage to the hero inside all of you.

Entomos, also known as "the bug show" is ending this Saturday, January 19, 2013.  You have just a short time to stop by Exhibit A at 22 W. Market St. in Corning to take a look. On Friday the 18th, there is a noontime talk with artists Marc Dennis and Cheryl Anne Lorance.  I wish I could be there but alas, my teaching gig requires me to be teaching that day.

Entomos has some very amazing work.  All of the work is insect inspired and there is a tremendous variety to explore.  I hope that you'll stop in and take a look before this fabulous show ends.  I plan to be in the gallery Saturday afternoon.  Stop by and see me.  I can tell you the story of how these insects at the left (Curculionidae -Celebia arrigans) the Weevil/Snout Beetle of Sulawesi (one of the four larger Sunda Islands of Indonesia) came to live at my house in America.

During a recent studio visit, a curator from a museum asked me to describe my process.  He wanted to understand what Scanography really is in both a technical sense and in an artistic sense.  HIs admitted knowledge was that I lay things on the scanner and capture the image.  Easy right?  Well, not quite.  In fact, not even close.  This blog entry is for that curator and everyone else who doesn't really totally understand what I'm doing.  I'm warning you right now that this is about to get wordy.

First, I want to say that the way I work, isn't the way every artist working in scanner photography works.  Just like painting, drawing, traditional photography and sculpture, every artist has their own approach or method that gets them to the place they want to be.  I know that my process has evolved over many years.  I studied traditional art making methods at art school and initially worked in printmaking because the idea of multiple prints was very appealing to me.  I did a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of drawing to study the physical structure of objects, and figures.  I spent quite a bit of my early career as an artist painting.  I liked photorealism and I strived to depict my subjects as if they were photographs. Until one day when I had an epiphany, "save yourself some time and just take photographs".  At that point which was nearly 20 years ago, I took a series of photo classes as a post graduate student and learned quite a bit about black and white photography, honed my compositional skills and really considered what it was that I wanted to communicate.  I was also teaching myself how to use PhotoShop.  Right about then my photo professor, Jan Kather,  introduced me to capturing images using a scanner and all bets were suddenly off.  I had finally found my medium and set off to discover how to really use it well.  That was 1998.

My technical process reflects all of the various incarnations I've had as an artist.  First, Scanography is part photography although it's a somewhat distant relative.  Many photographers have actually told me they don't think it's photography at all and they would prefer to think of it as digital art.   It's true that I do not use a camera of any kind and many photographer's believe that if you aren't using a camera then it isn't photography.  Of course, if that's the qualifier then neither is a photogram, shadow catching or xerox art.  Since those art forms fall into photography, I'm going to conclude that Scanography is a legitimate off-shoot as well.  But, given that, I will say that my work is really a combination of three or four main practices of art.  One of those is photography/digital imaging.  I scan my subjects at high resolutions and I manipulate them with PhotoShop.  Secondly, many of my works are actually partially constructed.  Lately I've become really fascinated with building little models and then capturing those with my scanner.  

Paradigm Shift © 2012 is a perfect example of how my work has taken a constructed direction.  For this image I wanted to communicate the idea of rising out of ruin and going toward a higher existence.  I started by building a tiny ladder.  Actually I built five ladders until I got one that I thought would work well.  They were lashed together using sticks and hemp cord.  I wanted a human, hand-made look to them, to convey the idea that change is of our own making.  Once I had the ladder, I set about building a small, temporary construction around it.  I gathered rocks to represent barren lands, rusty mechanical parts to represent industrial decay, even an old rusty key to represent the idea that old solutions don't always open the doors we need opened now.  I guess one could say this constructed portion is part additive sculpture and part assemblage.  This was then scanned at a really high resolution.  I scanned an apple separately and composited it in later, in PhotoShop. I wanted it to be much smaller than the actual scale would allow.  The apple represents knowledge or higher thinking.  Or maybe something forbidden that seems out of reach but can be gotten to through hard work.  You as the viewer can decide.  I lay the groundwork and fill my art with symbols but you as the viewer get to connect the dots.  What fun!

Next comes the drawing and painting skills.  Alpha and Omega © 2011 is a good example to discuss in that vein.  For Alpha and Omega, I composited two separate images together, the pigeon skeleton and the robin's egg.  Again, these images had to be done separately because of scale differences.  PhotoShop was used to put these two together.  Drawing skills were really important because in order to make it look real, I had to understand how light and shadow work.  That's a skill one picks up from years of drawing and painting.  If you look really closely at this image you will notice the subtle shadows behind the skeleton that project onto the inside of the shell.  This adds to the reality of the image.  I needed to create that.  It wasn't there originally.  Another way that drawing skills are used here is that scans have a really short depth of field. They tend to look rather flat in their unmanipulated state.  Depth of field is the field of sharp focus from near to far.  It can be anywhere from about an inch to perhaps 3 or 4 inches if you work at it.   To create all of the dimension you are seeing in the completed image I literally draw with light and shadow into the images.  I create highlights and shadows where there were none.  Ocasionally I need to actually paint in a part that isn't there.  That is true with Soul Mates © 2012, the two grasshopper image at the top of this post.  That grasshopper had a missing leg and a missing antennae.  This meant I had to create it by painting it.  Here's where the skills I learned as a budding photorealist painter come into play in my current work.  Sometimes I have to fix a missing part.  It's really time consuming to do this and I admit that I try to avoid having to, but when push comes to shove and I want something that isn't there I resort to painting it in.  Also from the realm of painting comes color manipulation skill.  Understanding how color works comes from years spent painting.  Knowing how to mix the colors I want to see comes from time spent learning color theory through practice.

All of those artistic skill sets, photography, digital imaging, construction, painting and drawing , add up to the skill set I tap into to create my work.  It isn't just laying something on a scanner and pushing a button.  Yes, there are people out there creating images that are just exactly that but, most of those images aren't really art, they are experimentation.  Yes, experimentation is where it begins but art is something bigger than any of that.  In fact, art is much more than my technique.  What makes my work art is concept.  Concept, or idea, is where all of my work really begins.  Like many artists, I keep a sketchbook.  I record my ideas as they happen and then later I come back to them and figure out how I can make them work as an artwork.  Common Valor 1:  Bond of Unity Medal is a conceptual piece in a series.  It took two years for this work to come into being from the initial flash of insight I had while visiting a military museum at Arlington National Cemetery.  The basic idea or concept for this series was that medals honored struggles, battles or actions of those in the military.  My conceptual twist was that all humans go through struggles, battles or transitions that they meet with similar bravery, loss and dignity.  I wanted to create honorable medals that would celebrate the extraordinary efforts of ordinary citizens.  This series explores that thought.

So, in conclusion, my art work is the culmination of technology, technique, a unique skill set  and conceptual thinking.  I marry those things together to create the work that I do.  It is so much more than laying something on a scanner and pushing a button and hopefully, after reading this blog entry, you, the reader, have a better understanding of my work.  

The gallery I am represented by, Exhibit A Contemporary Art, is moving from an upstairs location to a new street level location on Market Street in Corning, NY.  In preparation for this event, gallery owner Ann Welles is holding a special art sale:  Bye Buy 41.  She has invited artists from all over the region (many local) to bring in works.  She will be wheeling and dealing to make sales of small works this weekend.  I personally will be delivering seven works to this show.  My pieces were all made between 2010 and 2012.  Three are on canvas and four are metal prints.  

Included are works by Marshall and Caitlin Hyde, Lynn Rhoda Dates, Stefan Zoller, Andrew Gillis, Debb VanDelinder and more................So stop in, find a new treasure and give it a good home.  Support the arts in your community!

Bye Buy 41:  
Exhibit A Contemporary Art
41 E. Market Street (above Pure Design)
Corning, NY
Sat & Sun, Oct. 27 - 28
12:00 -5:00 pm, both days

Image at left:  From Once Broken
© 2011
Archival Aluminum Print
10" x 20"

I recently mentioned that I had joined a critique group this past summer.  We meet every month and discuss our current art work in an informal, social setting.  It's not at all like those deadly critiques that I remember from my college days.  You know, the ones where someone always left crying and heated discussions over drawing with paint versus painting a painting ensued?  Well....those are the kind I remember.  These are much more humane and productive.  

The work above has made an appearance at two critiques.  In August it was shown on the computer screen.  It hadn't even made it to a print proof yet.  I liked the square format but I was struggling with the work.  The circular pattern of Peruvian Grasshoppers was interesting yet I felt it was lacking something.  During my five minute allotment we discussed the piece.  I got some good feedback on spacing which has been adjusted a bit.  Everyone liked the subject matter and the play of a flower like shape made of insects.  I took it back to the studio and continued to stare at it for the next month.  I finally decided that what it lacked was a central and symbolic focal point.  I had tentatively titled this The Mating Dance so I did a little research into what sort of fruit could convey fertility.  I found that tomatoes symbolize fertility and since I had a whole bunch of tomatoes growing in my backyard, I marched outside,  picked a few and went to work.

I will say that I immediately like the piece better with this red tomato in the center.  It seemed to emanate as a light or energy source for the work and also alluded to the formation of an overall floral motif.  Still, I wasn't 100 percent certain that this was the final solution.  So, in October it went back to critique as a proof print.  I reintroduced it to the group and talked about how I hadn't felt it was done without something in the center.  The immediate response was a positive one. Yes, they agreed that it had needed something there and this could work.  From the back of the room another artist suggested I make one more revision.  "Instead of a tomato, use a pomegranate."  said Bridget.  She elaborated that the pomegranate has a long standing symbolism of fertility because of its juicy red seeds.  Several others in the group agreed, the five minute duck warning quacked, and we moved on to the next artist,

After pondering it for several days I decided that I would give that a try.  Off to the grocery store, in search of a pomegranate, I went.  I found one that was a deep red and had a fairly round shape.  I brought it home amongst the apples, bananas and other produce for this week's cooking,  After storing the groceries I carefully sliced open the skin and pulled the fruit in half to reveal the ripe red seeds inside.  It took a bit of "fruit surgery" to produce the appearance I knew I wanted.  Next I took it down to my studio and made the scan, placed it into the original scan and followed that with a few hours worth of corrections.  The resulting image is a little more mystical in its appearance.  The addition of the pomegranate gives a feeling of a ceremony, or offering and speaks to traditions about courtship and marriage.

If it weren't for my critique group I may not have arrived at this particular solution to a piece I struggled with.  Instead, because I risked putting it up for discussion I ended up with a much more solid, symbolic and meaningful work.  Getting out of my own studio into a group setting for critique has been a positive experience for me.  I arrive, work in hand, with a goal of growth in my heart. 

My next show is coming up in mid November.  I've been busy working in my studio to prepare for this group show at Exhibit A, ENTOMOS.  It will be the first exhibition at Exhibit A's new street level location at 22 East Market Street in Corning, NY.  One of the works I created for this show is at the left:  The Fourth Power of Two © 2012, Archival Aluminum Print, Edition No. 1/5, 16" x 16".  

For this body of work I have been working with all kinds of exotic insects from South America, Africa and Australia.  It's been a real roller coaster ride in some ways because when I started I really wasn't a big fan of bugs at all.  In fact, the thought of actually touching them was a pretty repulsive thought.  In the name of art, I got over it, although it took me three weeks to actually bring myself to open the package when it arrived from the insect shop in Canada.  Yes, I bought my bugs online.  They spent a few weeks in customs until they were allowed to come into the country.  

Entomos features works by Bethany Krull, Cheryl Anne Lorance, Esther Neisen, Julian Montegue, Marc Dennis, Michael Rogers,  Nancy Sutcliffe, Jo Newman and Debb VanDelinder (me).  "This exhibition explores insect imagery in a variety of mediums and disparate conceptual intentions. Insects and arachnids possess unique aesthetic attributes, can evoke strong personal responses and tap into references ranging from cultural beliefs to scientific study.  People will be surprised by the variety of work brought together in this show. says Ann Welles, director of Exhibit A.   "They will see everything from anthropomorphic, and sympathetic figures created in porcelain by Bethany Krull to the highly stylized portraits of spiders by Julian Montegue."   ENTOMOS opens the evening of Friday November 16, 2012 and runs through January 19, 2013. Specific times of the Friday reception are pending.

Once artists leave the formal halls of academia we often find ourselves working alone in our studios.  Art can be a very solitary practice.  One has to stay motivated to keep moving forward.  It is easy to become stuck working in this type of vacuum.  Worse yet you can get tunnel vision.  I know sometimes I get so close to my work that I cannot see something that is right in front of me.  A new set of eyes on your work can be a valuable thing.  

For these reasons, I recently joined an artist's critique group.  We meet once a month, informally at one of the group member's homes.  Every month we meet in a different space, get to see that artist's studio, socialize over food and drinks and then spend time looking at and discussing new works in progress.  Each artist's work that is brought to critique gets five sustained minutes of attention.  It's short and yet enough to get a reaction from the group and feedback about its strengths and weaknesses.  I am enjoying the process.  It's actually the first time since taking college classes that I've been able to enjoy this kind of conversation in an organized session.  I would encourage artists to join such a group or form one in your area.  I'm finding it a positive presence in my artistic practice.

This is the last week that you can see,  Sticks and Stones and Bits of Bones at Mansfield University's Loomis Gallery, in Allen Hall.  The exhibit comes down late Friday afternoon.  This show of 25 recent pieces has been a wonderful opportunity. Allen Hall is located on Stadium Drive at the top of the Mansfield University Campus.  It's a beautiful drive.  See it now before it's all done.

Loomis Gallery, Allen Hall
Mansfield University
135 Stadium Dr.
Mansfield, PA

There are just ‎14 days left to see Sticks and Stones and Bits of Bones at Mansfield University.  Meanwhile in the studio I am going buggy!  That's right, buggy!  Insects, insects and more insects have invaded my studio.  Fortunately they are specimen insects.  I bought them from an insect shop in Canada.  They are dried and preserved for scientific use.  After spending a few weeks in customs they were deemed acceptable to be delivered and now they are sitting in my studio.  I will admit it took me a couple of weeks to bring myself to open the containers and take a look.  I'm not exactly a big fan of bugs but I must admit I've become quite comfortable with these specimen insects now that I am working with them.  Insects are quite intricately detailed, colorful and really rather beautiful after one gets past the fact that they are bugs.