the artist

This is a self portrait, that started out as a photo of me, at the medieval Knights Templar Commanderie de la Romagne, at Saint-Maurice sur Vingeanne, in France.   I gave the photo  a  painterly look and changed the modern pen into an old quill.  I also made my modern shirt look more medieval. 

shadows of medieval times

Late afternoon, the sun breaks thru the stained glass window, and paints a shadow  on the wall of the Cathédrale Saint-Étienne de Metz .......

woods at dolphin rock abstract 1

.....one from my DOLPHIN ROCK series ..... there is a secret, mostly unknown place, in western North Carolina that has a rock formation, that looks like a dolphin jumping out of the water...... I was fortunate enough to have a friend show it to me ...... surrounding the dolphin, are a stand of birch trees that I captured in this still, and then I created a this painterly feel, using various techniques including different Topaz filters..... 

abstract yellow woods

one from my abstract series ..... it started out as a window reflection of the autumn woods, surrounding our cabin in the mountains of western North Carolina ..... funked it up, using various Topaz filters.........

reflections

in the cool mountains of western North Carolina, grows a pretty little plant called the spotted jewelweed... the flowers are less than one inch in size ..... an old Cherokee remedy for insect bites and poison ivy comes from the juice of its stems .....

Dandelion Dreams

this is another piece from my dandelion dream series..... enjoy ....

                                       Butterfly Dreams

The butterfly and the thistle are real, but the rest is just fantasy... in the spring each year, up in the mountains of western North Carolina, the butterflies enjoy a feast of mostly thistle nectar... you have to catch them a few hours after sunrise when the sun warms  their wings and they enjoy fluttering from flower to flower, until they are full...... it is kind of sad that most of them just live for a few days, but I realize that they lived first as a caterpillar, and then inside a chrysalis, so that in reality, they live longer than that ... but nevertheless, their lives are short in comparison to other animals .... so I enjoy capturing them so they can live on, as pixels for a bit longer ......

Dandelion Dreams 2

                                        Scanography Art

Another one in my Dandelion Dreams series......yes, it is a scan and not a capture from a camera...... I tried to create the illusion of the wind carrying the dandelion seeds into the night..... it would be difficult to create that feel with a regular camera.... the reason it has that  unordered look is because I did not try to place the seeds in any particular way, but instead threw them on the glass, over and over, until I got the desired effect....... if I had placed them, you would be able to tell because only nature can truly be totally random .....

blue waters abstract 1

This is a custom art piece that I did a few months ago.  It started out as a camera capture of a small stream in the Helen and Allen Cruickshank sanctuary in Rockledge Florida.  Just some weeds in a creek.  I played around with it in Photoshop using various TOPAZ plugins.  After a number of tries, I got a rather interesting abstract piece that I worked on for a while and then put it aside.  Then one day I showed it to someone and I started to try different crops and I changed it from a horizontal to a vertical piece... VOILA, he said he had just the place for it in his home.... and he now has it hanging up in his bedroom ...

dandelion dreams

this is one from  my dandelion dreams series.... this is actually a capture from my scanner ....It took me all day to arrange the dandelion heads on the scanner.... took 90 different scans until I found about 6 that I liked... this one has that feel of blowing in the wind that I was looking for  ....  other than cleaning up the dust from the scan, this is pretty much  unchanged from the original scan.... my time is spent arranging until I get just the right feel which I think I got on this one... I will be posting more of that series....