From 2009 through 2012, I made photographic studies of the Alexander Calder sculpture Two Disks that sits outside the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall in Washington, DC. I produced a new portfolio of images from these studies. What was most apparent to me was that the images are reminiscent of the Cubist and Expressionist stylistic era of Georges Braques, Pablo Picasso and Romare Bearden - artists whose work I greatly admire.
Intrigued by such a compelling stabile and location, I interpreted the sculpture and its setting by including the museum's facade and the crystalline blue sky above, each time I made photographs. I was drawn repeatedly to the shape of the disks and its internal structure, the texture of the museum walls and the gray, tonal palette of the sky. I made photographs of every possible angle, element and skylight. The juxtaposition of those elements in black and white brought me back to the Hirschhorn's courtyard time and time again during those three years.
My Calder study has evolved in 3 phases: There was the initial black and white study that lasted 3 years and formed the basis for subsequent interpretations. Second, there was an addition of a slight golden color mixed with the black of the black and white image.
It was during this phase that I discovered a very prominent "pyramidic" presence in the sculpture. They were first seen as triangles, but upon closer scrutiny and certainly indicative of intended extrapolation, if not my imagination, they became pyramids. And I found them throughout the sculpture; in many of my captures.
The pyramidic nuance, while seemingly far-fetched is actually spot-on when it comes to the artistic-aesthetic spirit. Where else do we, as artists, find artistic influences and inspiration, but in the assumed and the imagined. The artistic eye looks at something sometimes for hours, envisioning, imagining and contemplating that which might be and then we begins to execute commensurate with our chosen medium.
With Two Disks, I saw shape and the intrusion of light and adjacent textural facades and illuminating Sun. I honestly felt like I was in an active symbiotic interplay with the sculpture. There was a "siren song" drawing me to the sculpture time and time again, and that draw became almost humorously intense.
After each session, I felt "done" for that day, but I continued to play with the images in my mind on my way home, and throughout daily life. It wasn't until much later when I actually had a demonstrable sense that it was over – completed – that I felt finished for the day.
I would begin to plan the next session with my siren.

The third phase of my Calder study occurred when I began to layer the various images I had captured of the sculpture and craft them in Photoshop and Microsoft Picture Manager.
I took an image and layered what I considered to be a complementary image over it in Photoshop. I moved the new layered image into Microsoft Picture Manager and began to change Hue, Saturation and Amount. Each technique has a sliding scale and I could watch how my new image was progressing. At this point I would add another image or more, rotating the image from horizontal to vertical or vice versa. I would add contrast or remove it. The manipulations were limitless.
This burst of colorful expression freed me to develop increasingly abstracted images for my layered photographic series. I was energized with the crafting of each new image.
Very often something in the image sparked an idea and a unique title came to mind. I spent time revisiting my artistic influences (i.e., Classicism, Romanticism, Cubism, and Expressionism) for inspiration and guidance, and exploring digital image manipulation. Once I discovered the satisfaction of layering images, I burst through my self-imposed monochrome (black and white) wall and embraced a new colorful spectrum.
As I moved forward with this new inspiration, I spent just over a year crafting these images, which reflected respect and admiration for Cubist and Expressionist traditions. In my mind the fresh aspect was that they were photographic images, crafted and printed with results that have a traditional painting integrity, but continue to validate the photographic medium as a vibrant and significant artistic expression.

When I began to explore photography as a possible professional artistic career, it was black and white photography that was the most compelling and challenging form of expression. As I looked around, I realized that everything I saw was already in color and if I was going to make a significant photographic statement, a color photograph was too familiar and I wanted to say something extraordinary.
Black and white images, however, required more of an aesthetic consideration in execution. I had to transcend the ordinary visual surroundings and think in terms of blacks and whites and all the grays in between. It was Pre-visualization and the Zone System of Ansel Adams and Minor White that were my guides.
Not only was I developing a system and process for making artistic statements I was forming a lexicon by which I could teach photography, as well as produce it.
My process was to capture light from where it touched on scenes and objects in order to elevate an ordinary image to extraordinary.
Light is the key to a strong aesthetic in photography, especially black and white photography.
This project is a representative portfolio of my original black and white photography, which I began pursuing in 1970. It represents my fundamental interest in what light does and how important it is in transforming the familiar into a new and exciting image.
When teaching photography, I start with the idea of pre-visualization and have students look at lots of black and white work of the Masters: Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier Bresson, Imogen Cunningham Robert Doisneau, Gordon Parks, Roy DeCarava, and others. They set the standard, which means detail in the shadows, as well as in the highlight area. However, the range of tonal values should be specific to the subject and how the photograph is crafted. If you are photographing a scene in a foggy environment, you might not need a complete range of tonal values of 0 - 9. You may only need a shortened range, say between 0 - 6 because the overall effect you want to capture is the gray-ness of the scene.
After an in-depth look at the standard, students must now begin to "pre-visualize" scenes they want to capture, with a definite context developing as they consider what they shoot and why.
That which I teach is that which I practice. Each time I make a photograph, I am always pre-visualizing what it will look like as a print and then a step further, to what it will look like matted, framed and on a gallery wall.
I look at the most mundane of scenes and objects and how the available light is touching. Then I am looking and crafting what I see through the viewfinder by going from horizontal to vertical or getting close or moving back. I am also fine tuning my exposure with the Exposure Bias to add more contrast in order to increase a dramatic effect. It is an ongoing process.
Along with this process, it is also important for the photographer to begin an aesthetic context of what kind of visual statement is to be made. In each of my projects, especially the black and white gelatin and the Calder interpretation, I was keenly aware of the statement that was evolving as I photographed and crafted the images I ultimately chose for prints and to show.
Context, mechanics and overall visual literacy is paramount in a portfolio study. This is ultimately my goal and the goal I want my students to have as well.

An addendum to my Calder-Abstract-portfolio was a series of images created when I decided I wanted to add a human to the mix. I searched for just the right face and body. The first one I chose did not work out because the face was too round, but then one day at the library I saw a woman and I immediately found what I was looking for. She had the head shape for the silhouette I needed and she was thin enough to have the lines that were consistent with my other layered Calder images.
I produced a series of Black History Month images with titles that suggested idioms relevant to the African American cultural experience.

Every morning I am up before dawn in order to see what delights the sun and moon will bring to the day. The sun rising; the Moon setting. This continuity of motion plays itself out amidst a pastoral setting and idyllic "Gymnopedie" every morning and I stand waiting to see what the light will do and how it will look in the rising sun or the setting moon.
On a particular morning, a mix of cold and moderately warm temperatures the day and night before made for a very foggy morning.
My apartment in Middle River, MD is nestled in among a wide expanse of forest woodlands. Across the road at Crossroads Circle just off White Marsh Blvd is an enormous field. As open as it is, there are mounds and berms and dunes set against a wide background of tall saplings. I call it "Middle River Moor"s.
I pre-visualized it initially in black and white mostly because of the fog that morning, so I began shooting in black and white mode. I was walking around it looking at the dry marsh area of stones in a shallow gully that rises and how it was picturesque against the line of saplings. Then there was the fog that settled, in front of the saplings and drifted in an ever-evolving sway, in slow motion. I envisioned a print which was wide and captured the expanse of the fog against the trees.
I moved on across the "Moors" and captured the rustic, seemingly impromptu and unpaved roads that are winding paths leading to the horizon created by the saplings in the distance. Along that path there are gullies and single, leafless trees that are silhouetted against the line of trees in the distance and the sky above. There are shrubs and still colorful grasses even in Winter, that rise and fall with the land and a fence that seems to exist as some sort of marker perhaps for an upcoming construction project. That gave me a sense of urgency in that the land may not exist for long in its present condition.
After dozens of shots in black and white. I switched to color and began shooting the colorful grasses that rose and fell in dune-like compositions and noticed that even with the color of the grasses, they still fell against that line of saplings in the distance that maintained their grayness.
When I was finished, and after editing down to a precious dozen or so, the photographs were added to my "Middle River Portfolio".

Mother Nature is at once simplistic and complex in the attention paid to the design of flowers. She seemingly does not try very hard yet achieves extraordinary results. Every year, one can depend extraordinary species emerging to delight and astound the observer. A close look at flowers from the moment they begin to poke their little heads out of delicately stretched stalks (peduncles) reveals a uniqueness that is stunningly colorful and intricate.
The fascination with flowers is primal, grabbing your attention, provoking oohs and ahhs of appreciation. The ability to capture their beauty and singularity is more than mechanical. The challenge is to above all else record the colors accurately and then to translate those colors into blacks and whites and the range of grays in between, in order to evoke feeling or some memory of the familiar.
Let's be clear there can be extraordinary black and white flower photography. That beauty can lie in shape, texture, tonal quality and delicacy. Black and white photographs of orchids can at once send shivers of joy and astonishment to the beholder. One can almost inhale the lilting bouquet of a violet Cataleya and the Lady Slipper with its myriad colors, and its unique construction and design is most fascinating and will capture one’s attention.

These photographs are inspired by the landscape of the Middle River area of Baltimore County where I live. In particular, the fog rolls in and out frequently and provides excitingly moody and provocative scenes I have captured in color and in black and white. The black and white photographs are the most compelling and strike moods that are contemplative as well as artistically interesting and engaging.
In addition to fog inspired photographs, there is a pristine presence in the landscape of the immediate Middle River area, where much of the area is undeveloped, although development is quickly on the rise, with more rental properties, shopping malls, and a hotel are being planned and whose construction in many cases has already begun.
My intention is to capture as much of the landscape documenting in exact locations areas that have original integrity before the inevitable commercial development overcomes it.
These photographs involved cold early mornings in many instances. There were excursions in the twilight evening hours; walking to find where street lights or even Moonlight would touch an area or object or scene. Therein would create a simply illuminated subject for capture in the context in which I love to shoot the majority of my work.
I find these photographs of placid water and land features, contemplative areas, which provoke thought and mood and do much to invigorate the human spirit. These areas are rapidly disappearing in all parts of the state and even though much land has been set aside and even protected by government decree, access to those areas shrink and can have just as disturbing an impact as though they were just as vulnerable as commercial zones.

Abstract Expressionist Humanism is an attempt at defining or codifying humankind's efforts at understanding the intersecting of dimensions and boundaries not just physical or spiritual but of thought and understanding.
I added a human figure to my abstract in order to  illuminate the human search for reason and being. Inasmuch as we live in a multiverse of dimensions that cross boundaries and intersect at moments and places of understanding, the search for knowledge and understanding is ongoing.
Within the abstract lies concrete images; within those concrete images lies elements of mystery and multiversal dimensions where knowledge exists. Humans coexist with the abstract physically as well as aesthetically, thus the layering of photographic images  becomes a metaphor for understanding the universality or the multiversality of  knowledge. 
The unknown exists waiting to be discovered on different planes. Each plane has multi-dimensional planes where life exists either in the abstract or in some kind of concrete form.
Humankind's search is never-ending.

The Draftswoman’s Portal is a mythology in which the images and their textures and sub-images create a context I have described as female and multi-dimensional.
The Draftswoman’s Portal is also an evolving mythology that combines vibrant imagery with complex visual energy, in which an existential undercurrent provides a platform for imagining a universe in which the female of the human species and the concept of birth extends to the very creation of humankind and its cosmology.
 
The Mythology amplifies the human cultural concept of a theistic construct which relies on submission and acceptance of principles that in turn amplify the human willingness to adhere to superhuman qualities, which provide a safe, secure and explainable existence.
 
My study of Calder’s Two Discs sculpture revealed many portals of discovery and interpretation. Some were, to me, obviously celestial in origin and led to the creation of The Draftswoman Mythology. 
 
My mythology is an exercise in an existential proposition, which promotes the theory that a cosmic thread through the universe or multiverse is female in function and character.
Critical to the mythology is the Draftswoman’s Vision. The Draftswoman is the architect of humanity. She directs her influence to the Earthly bound so they understand through experience, introspection, and curiosity. With the architect, there is predestination throughout humankind’s experience and brevity in this dimension and wisdom is sought in order to move to the next dimension.
The Draftswoman is within the Portal, the labyrinth by which destinations are sought and challenges undertaken. Entering the Draftswoman’s portal is often voluntary. One can give himself over. Once in you succumb to the Architect and the challenges that are presented.
Choosing paths after arriving at a fork in a road either physically or metaphorically is the construct of the architect.
In an abstract, there is an implied absence of form and perhaps substance. I explore the opposite which implies that within that abstraction there is an essence and substance that suggest a larger and more substantive philosophy and narrative. I have created a cosmology which celebrates the female presence in a theoretical dimension, and may theoretically be the entrance to a portal leading to other relative or even disparate dimensions, but, which have a common cosmic purpose and character.
If one considers the semantics of the term “birth”, then, an extrapolation of that encompasses the female of the species which births others of its species. Further extrapolation would suggest that the “Big Bang” was a birthing and thus a birthing by a female entity.
The Big Bang, therefore can be considered to have happened by happenstance or by decree.
Decree would be, in a sense by a higher intelligence and an active energy, whereas happenstance would imply a more passive process. This then is the overarching concept of an actual Supreme Being or entity, which ultimately decrees or designs the cosmos. It thus is mimicked in theory as well as in practice by traditional mythologies and theologies of various cultures.
The Draftswoman’s Portal is an ongoing project which takes its energy from a historical context of struggle either by the archetypical artist or social engineer, who constructs via his aesthetic vision.