I am sixty-seven years old. I hold an Associate of Applied Science degree in photographic studies, a Bachelor of Science degree in art education, and a Master of Arts degree in alternative photographic processes and the history of photography. I taught art in a Catholic grade school for one year and in a high school for the next thirty. Along the way, I also worked as an adjunct or part-time instructor at a junior college and a four-year university for the better part of thirty-five years. Over that span, I’ve made thousands of photographs—good and bad—a dozen or so paintings of equally debatable merit, and a modest number of clay pots.
But this chapter of my life—if life indeed has chapters—has given me something I’ve never had before: the chance to make art as the first order of business, rather than what happens after the teaching day is done or when a weekend opens up. I’ve mentioned before that my final eighteen months of teaching were unusually productive. It was a joyful period of exploration, one that hinted at the possibility of more. Still, it took a few years—and the quiet permission of time—to understand that this was something I could simply do.
In the winter of 2023–24, I taught myself salt printing, relearned cyanotype, and experimented with piezography, a carbon ink printing process. In the summer of 2024, I enrolled in an online still-life course to sharpen my skills before the fall semester. That’s when things began to fall into place. Since then, still life and layered imagery have become my focus—my jam, as it were. The work began to gel. The art, and the artist, started to emerge.
I’ve been told by a few people that I’m too old to be “emerging,” and too entrenched in the art world as an educator to be considered an outsider. But this is new, and with it has come the blessing of a beginner’s mind. I don’t much care what it’s called. I only know that something has shifted: artist and educator, not the other way around. And it suits me just fine.
In the fifteen to seventeen months I’ve devoted exclusively to still life, I’ve completed roughly that many finished pieces. Each print is unique—one of a kind. Photography, by its nature, doesn’t usually lend itself to that condition, and that’s part of what makes this journey so meaningful. It isn’t just new to me; in a small but genuine way, it’s new. While there are a handful of artists working with transfer processes, to my knowledge no one is pursuing this particular path with the same focus or intent.
So, to quote the poet Carl Spackler, “So I got that going for me—which is nice.”