Sublime Inner Life

Photos


Photography, for me, is an intuitive, spiritual, and contemplative practice. I can’t really put into words how or why I choose to photograph certain things. It is like a calling, being in tune with something higher. The urge arises within me as an “inner need” as Kandinsky calls it. I see something and intuitively feel a resonance, that the scene or the moment or the object framed in a particular way captures a secret living essence hidden in what I am seeing. Truly, everything has a hidden life or world inside of it. It’s a kind of “Ah ha!” moment that feels self-evident once seen. Something happens on multiple levels: there is the external form of beauty but also a hidden, internal aliveness that calls out to be recorded, recognized, celebrated.

I'm especially drawn to repeating patterns, textures, or geometric shapes found in architecture or nature. Goethe famously said, “Music is liquid architecture; architecture is frozen music,” and I believe that is really true. All forms of art resonate and complement each other the way the electromagnetic spectrum expresses itself to us whether visually through light and color or auditorily through sound. Or as in physics, what we perceive as solid, material forms are really vibrating particles of energy, another kind of light or music. There is a fantastic feeling of grandeur, an epic monumentality, in certain forms, whether in a bridge or a building, or in the close up of the ridges in the bark of a tree, like a miniature Grand Canyon, all of these things have an analogue in musical form as well, like the driving forces of a climactic crescendo in a symphony.

Paradoxically, while there is so much energy, vitality, and movement in form, there is simultaneously a stillness or minimalism present. I adore stillness and minimalism. They are vitally important, as if the consciousness takes a deep breath and comes fully into the present moment, awakening to itself. Stillness brings space to the psyche and the soul to open up and move around, to feel most alive. Photography, like music, painting, architecture, and the many other expressions of Beauty, is about recognizing this numinous state of awe and wonder that we are living in. We are immersed in Beauty every moment on this planet and in this universe, and Art is humanity’s way of reflecting it and expressing it, like a Eucharistic giving back, a communion and a communication.

I hope my photographs will help you to see the numinous all around you and open up new perspectives for appreciating life.