Concerning the history trekker’s rambles

I used to live in a small midwestern town – Vincennes, Indiana in fact. In Vincennes it was possible to walk, late at night through the streets, and when the cars were gone there were certain spots where if you looked at just the right angle, you could see the town as it was 100 years before. It’s at those moments that time stands still, and I saw what it was I wanted to do with my photography.

Power lines, billboards, store signs, automobiles – all these things block our view of the past. And it’s our goal, as travelers to places historical, to find a way to make the present recede into the background, to see the places as they were.

With a little imagination, and a lot of Photoshop, it’s possible to find traces of the past in the world today. Once there was a time when the world was simpler, a bit more picturesque, and the architecture still hinted at the medieval, or at least had a sense of regional style. People dressed in ways that were both functional and colorful. There are still places in America and throughout the world where the past still peeks out at us through the cracks.

And it is for the history trekkers to seek them out.

My work has appeared in the New York Times, Indianapolis Post, CNN, Broadway World and BBC websites, travel sites for Plimoth Plantation, Savannah, Georgia; Donegal, Ireland and Bath, England. I’ve also worked with Philipsburg Manor and the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow, New York and Washington Irving’s home Sunnyside in Irvington, New York.I also contributed to a forthcoming book on the factual basis for the legends of Sleepy Hollow and the Hudson River Valley by Jonathan Kruk, as well as contributing the artwork and research for Haunted Long Island II by Lynda Lee Macken.

I’ve also worked freelance as an illustrator and graphic designer for major corporations, agencies and institutions, including Ogilvy and Mathers, Lintas/New York, Bristol Myers Squibb, Eli Lilly, Southern Indiana Gas and Electric Company, the City of Evansville, Vincennes University and others. I’m currently proprietor of The Green Man Design Studio, certified customizer of photographer’s websites for SmugMug.

I recently completed a one-person exhibition of photographs at the HDK Digital Gallery of Art in Detmold, Germany. According to Hartwig Kopp Delaney, curator of the museum’s catalogue of the show, “A noble and mature spirit creates compositions here of high artistic skill and sensibility. Wisdom and humor are mirrored within. Peace and harmony. Simultaneously and without contradiction, they are melancholic, thoughtful, and lure the viewers in to the depths of their own souls, but not into the depths of horror and dread, but rather in the childlike spheres of curiosity and dreaming.” Or as my mother says, “ooh pretty!”

In addition, my artwork has been exhibited at the Mitchell Museum of Art in Mt. Vernon, Illinois, The Jungle in Evansville, Indiana, as well as numerous local exhibitions throughout southern Illinois.

I’m available for assignments – with a specialization in the eastern seaboard, the midwest as well as England and Ireland. My work is also available for commercial use by contacting me directly.