6"x9"-Trade Publication
It all started on a gray day, which seemed to drive me to depression (not unusual; I don't much like gray days). It was not a clinical depression; just a self-indulgent convenient malaise. It was a depression more like what Vladimir Nabokov describes in a passage from the book Lolita when he writes: "... and going to a cabinet, he produced a vial of violet-blue capsules banded with dark purple at one end, which, he said, had just been placed on the market and were intended not for neurotics whom a draft of water could calm if properly administered, but only for great sleepless artists who had to die for a few hours in order to live for centuries." although I might easily be accused of being overly dramatic if I had penned those words about myself.

But then, just as many of my painting go through stages of “gray,” the more I worked on this book the more magic I experienced. Even the "dead” flowers that I had photographed the first day, I revisited 3 days later to discover that a wonderful white lily had risen out of the tangle of dead leaves.

As I photographed and reviewed the detritus of my life, the "mess" of my creative life at my studio, the photographs made everything more tangible and manageable; and I even began to have a vision of hope. Then as I paired photographs of my past and present, they started to form new connections. I began to understand that by forging new relationships between objects or photographs, a whole new world of optimism opened up. Through these innovative connections, hopelessness was replaced with not only hope, but with a new world and a new life.