And, Yet, Beauty Persists

I took my first “art” photography course in 1975 at the Worcester Art Museum while working as a reporter for a small daily newspaper in Southbridge, Massachusetts where all the reporters carried cameras. The “journalistic” part of photography I got having worked at newspapers through college. The “art” part I was curious about since I’d always been drawn to creative pursuits dabbling in writing and art projects throughout my college years.

One photograph I took that stands out in my memories from that time is of brown oak leaves hanging on to a branch in the dead of winter and another of a path through the woods – both black-and-white in those days. In the past few months, as I worked on this series and looked back and thought about the last 50 years of my personal art journey and the hundreds of photos I have taken, I realized that I had returned often to the elegance and simplicity of the dead leaves and what they were telling me about the transience of life, but also the path through the woods – the life journey we all take as humans - alluring, but unknown.

So, for me, my artwork in this exhibit which I am calling, “And Yet, Beauty Persists” has been about looking back at the unfolding of my own artistic life and a persistent interest in finding beauty and meaning in nature’s inevitable impermanence -- a curiosity about what is next, but also concern about what the past portends.

Sure, these images depict moments that are fleeting, already gone when we look at them again. But, somehow, for me, they also capture the ambiguity of what I perceive as wholeness -- the beauty of decay, light in the dark, the etchings and patterns of time, the sadness of loss and, and yet, the promise of renewal. Put simply, a reason for hope in what some may perceive as dark times.