To the Fields at Dawn Photograph

Composition. It’s an inherent and integral aspect of the two-dimensional arts. In most art forms, composition is a creation of the artist. In photography, limited to using the visible world as it’s palette, that composition must be discovered. The joy of that discovery, of finding beauty in juxtaposition within the frame, is what drives me as an artist. The realization that beauty can be found anywhere, given the right frame and composition, is a constant source of wonder. Beauty is there, waiting to be discovered. I’ve spent my career developing and refining my eye for composition. I earned a Bachelors of Fine Art in Photography from Ohio University in the US. I worked for five years as a photo-journalist shooting every day, followed by stints at commercial, corporate, industrial, architectural, editorial, documentary and portrait photography. In all of the genres I worked in, I always strove for clean, controlled composition and lighting. In creating hundreds-of-thousands of images in nearly every kind of environment, I learned that good composition makes or breaks an image, and that the elements of good composition can be found anywhere. My images revel in composition. Light and line, shape and shadow, tone and texture, and color or the lack of it, all aligned within the frame to form a controlled organization of elements. Regardless of the subject, the visual balance and harmony of elements provide an alluring form on which to rest the eye. Precisionism When I first saw the work of Charles Sheeler, I was immediately drawn to it. His work in the years between the world wars celebrated the ascendance of the machine age, depicting and idealizing the industrial landscape. He and a small, informal group of painters and photographers sought to represent, emulate, and celebrate the exactitude required of the machine age. Deemed Precisionists, they made no attempt at social commentary and generally included no people or signs of human presence. Rather they reveled in the utilitarian design of the machine age, reducing their subject to graphic elements and finding beauty in composition. Subjects were portrayed with a sense of simple perfection, clean in line, plane and light, showing no sign of wear or aging. They sought to portray the objective beauty of the modern world. Neo-Precisionism Now, as an artist working in the digital age, the time is ripe for a new Precisionism, for Neo-Presicionism.