Floral portraits from a cross cultural perspective

Dancing Roses

Artist Statement: Step Into My Garden

After a lifetime of travel, I've come home to tend my garden.

I went to Japan for the first time at age seven, spent my teenage years in Turkey, and returned to Japan as a college student. I served for three decades as an American diplomat across four continents. Communicating in Japanese, Portuguese, German, Spanish and Thai conditioned my aesthetic taste buds to a unique umami.

Step Into My Garden centers upon seeing grace in flowers through both the object focused Western aesthetic and the context oriented Eastern tradition. Some images celebrate the individuality and boldness of a single flower. Others more humbly place the focal flower in community. I present my large format images with no glass barrier or frame to obstruct experience of the image, the viewer can enter my garden and breathe.

The more deeply I work at my own art, the more acutely aware I am of a blended aesthetic that arises from the sense and sweetness of a whole lifetime. Bangkok’s bold color palette is on my walls and in my artistic taste buds, as is the appreciation for subtlety, imperfection and grace characteristic of Japanese wabi-sabi. My view of beauty, sense of color, and appreciation for texture and design are enriched by all that I have seen, all that I have come to love.

I make photographs of the flowers I grow in my garden out of gratitude for the beauty around me and for the gifts of global experience I have been given. The garden brings me solace and hope. I share my work in these politically difficult times with the hope that it might offer a path to transcendence.