I always wanted to be an artist .” A way into and a way out of. 

My earliest serious influence, Quita Brodhead, was my teacher from age thirteen. She was an artist of some import, my mentor and lifelong friend, who started me on my way, gave good crits and was always encouraging. 

Growing up, books on Picasso , Matisse and the Impressionists as well as wonderfully illustrated children’s books by Arthur Rackham , Leslie Neilson and others were always around. I grew up with LIFE magazine and my heroes were Henri Cartier Bresson and the photographers at Magnum, and my work followed these venerable influences. My education in photography came thru a community of generous and creative people. 

I went to Moore Institute of Art in Philadelphia, and continued my education at MICA night school. During the day I took care of my two young children and painted on the sly. 

In 1978 The Baltimore Museum gave me a show of my photographs. 

Work has taken me into two different arenas. As a photographer, specializing in black and white and hand colored work, for corporate, educational, institutional and documentary projects, I produced black and white images in house, from film to final print. As a fine artist, developing my noncommissioned work, I was free to expand the parameters of photography, while tending to its discipline. 

Early samples of this work involve the use of diptychs, hand painting on my photographs, and collage. 

Later I began collaging transparencies onto aluminum panels and merging them with painting, drawing sanding and carving. 

”Particles All; The Poetics of Physics Theories“ drew me into abstraction. From there a progression back into the narrative, and through another door. 

I received a commission by the Maryland Transit Authority to design a ten by two hundred foot mural for the Johns Hopkins Hospital transit stop, resulting in “Lost in the Cosmos” a mural about travel.. on the light rail and throughout the solar system. In porcelain enamel on steel. 

"Patapsco; Life Along Maryland’s Historic Valley” a project commissioned by the Friends of The Patapsco Greenway, and the Maryland Historic Trust, was published in 2006. Alison Kahn interviewed and wrote essays of people and places, and I made photographs , some hand colored, of the five mill towns along the Patapsco River and environmental portraits of the old timers who lived there. It was published by The Center for American Places, Columbia College, Chicago. 

Several consequential documentary projects. I worked on were “The Equitable Trust Photographic Survey Of Maryland,” directed by Tom Beck at UMBC Albin Kuhn Library. I photographed the watermen, the Amish and the tobacco farmers of St Mary’s County. I also photographed Fells Point, an historic waterfront district in Baltimore that was undergoing urban renewal. 

My negatives are in the archives of The Library of Congress and the Albin H Kuhn Library at UMBC. 

My work is in public and private collections nationally. 

A residency at The Vermont Studio Center, was an enlarging experience. 

It’s always been about metaphorically illustrating some aspect of our human dilemma. These days it is about the climate, personal stuff, social commentary.