Starting with Sky

This body of work has its genesis in the colors and shapes the sun paints in the sky at the beginning of each day. The beauty of the seemingly endless variety of sunrises I saw from my back porch last winter, compelled me to interrupt my morning routine to make a series of photographs. The opportunity to record these images, was both ephemeral and mercurial, as the eastern sky morphed from darkness to splendor, and then back to the mundane, over the course of a just a few minutes.

While the results were beautiful, the pictures were no where near as dynamic and imaginative as my memory of the original. So I was inspired to recreate (or perhaps relive) these mornings, by painting my own shapes in the sky. My instinct led me to create what feels like a collaboration of sorts, between myself and the sun, working together to recreate impression of a fluid sky morphing from one startling set of tones and shapes to another -- always fresh, never static and never feeling like a copy of any other morning.

I developed a consistent method for the work:

1. Each one begins with a single photograph, shot around dawn, looking east from my home.

2. Everything but the sky is cropped from the photo, and the resulting image is mirrored and then joined to the original, usually along the horizon, so it forms a kind of surround or enclosure, which serves as a background .

3. Imaginary shapes and objects are digitally sketched and small portions of the same dawn sky that serves as the background, are mapped on to their surfaces. These figments, born from the sky, become the actual subject of the image. Some echo familiar objects, others are simply doodle-like products of my brain -- ribbons, hollow pyramids, strands, and spheres.