ARTIST STATEMENT:

The responsibilities of family life and the need to earn a steady income has always taken precedence of any notion of being an artist. This had produced a mild form of split personality: one person being a regimented drone, the other person an artistic conscious of my responsibility to document the world around me, especially because people tend to not see the familiar.  As a retiree, I now have the time to think about and produce art.

The staggering amount of construction that has occurred in New York during the past few decades spurred me to begin consciously photographing the city that was and still is changing and disappearing.

The 1977 panoramic photography exhibit at NYU’s Grey’s Art Gallery and the photographs of a fellow photographer made me realize that I essentially viewed the world through a wide-angle lens.  It would take many years before I learned enough about wide-field photography and cameras to know how to obtain the results that I saw in my mind.

Painters, more than photographers have and continue to strongly influence me. Landscape painters and the Social Realists artists is where I have gotten most inspiration. The Hudson River Landscape painters, the Ash Can School, Edward Hooper, Reginald Marsh, Romare Bearden’s early collages of the rural South, and Bay Area Landscape painters Wayne Thiebaud and Richard Diebenkorn are favorites. Surrealist, Rene Magrite’s ” Kingdom of Light”, is the inspiration for my Twilight photographs. Eugene Atget, Andreas Fenninger, Bernice Abbot and Work Projects Administration (W.P.A.) artists have always been sources of inspiration.

                                                         James Connor