Artistically speaking, I suppose my history began around the age of six or seven, when I finally moved beyond crayons to begin dabbling in watercolors, then over the next six or seven years developed an increasingly photorealistic style of pencil rendering, focusing on any subject that happened to be at hand, but with a very strong emphasis on all the animals that populated the farm where I lived. Our cats and horses especially intrigued me--who could resist such blatant beauty, grace and character, just sitting there, already stunning, just waiting to be captured?

Nonetheless, when I began to study photography in college, my interest in drawing took a back burner for a while, as I became fascinated by the highly stylized graphic images that can be achieved with darkroom manipulation of high contrast films: I liked the detail, lighting and grainy textures that characterize photographic images, particularly in black and white, but found I liked them even better when they were printed from several generations of Kodalith film, as this allowed me to be highly selective in choosing what to emphasize or omit, where to add or delete colors, and how best to transform the literal realism of the original photo into a more dramatic, more emotive and more individualized graphic interpretation of the same subject. The whole idea of photo manipulation, in short, was very much under my skin, even before the digital revolution.