B&W Invitational — Winter’s Palimpsests
These are the winter abstracts I decided to show in Image City Photography Gallery’s 2025 B&W Invitational Exhibition, January 21 to February 16. They are instances of the evocative palimpsests winter writes and rewrites daily in shadow and snow.
Using Intentional Camera Movement, ICM, I wield the camera like a painter’s knife to reshape the high-contrast dynamism of light, shadow, and form of the winter woods into these minimal abstract expressions. My work is a form of discovery, merging what is seen with what is imagined and, as evidenced here, strongly influenced by abstract expressionism.
As the Rochester photographic artist Carl Chiarenza has written, “pictures come from pictures.” What we see shapes how we see. My work here expresses a vision of the simplicity and force that underlies the living world. In defense of his work in 1799, William Blake wrote, “Some Scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees.” Art is a mirror.
