I have been making art as long as I can remember.  There are notebooks with sketches from travel, from field work, from university research projects and from vacations.  There are photographs, most that faithfully report and a few that reveal more than the mind remembers.  There is even a little collection of acrylics made in a time of psychological intensity, now long past.  None of this would be called art of any quality, except for what I felt in the making of it.  The expression, the release, the emotional exploration certainly felt like the making of art, even if the results were indifferent.

But times have changed.  Experience, maturity (age!), chance encounters with art and with artists, and the deliverance from some of the immediacies and details of making a life have liberated me from the over-structured and over-scheduled past.

And digital cameras happened.  Modern digital cameras, together with modern computers and graphic software, provide a medium of expression that is wonderfully flexible, affordable and available for technical expression.  This medium also meshes well with my professional enthusiasms for landscape and scenery.  I make technical images for use in scientific writing and in university coursework.  As I get better control of my craft the images improve.  Some are so good they surprise me and I cry out, clap my hands and dance a little jig.  It is a good thing the kids are gone so I don't have to explain the goofiness. Carole is long since used to it.

I find myself making art more and more.  I find myself making art in the cool of the morning before breakfast.  Later in the day, on the way to some other task, I pass my studio space and step in, just for a minute, just to look again at an image from the previous day, just to decide how to print and how to mat an image from the previous week.  Two hours later I may go on the original task.  There is a palpable, physical pleasure in the revelation of a good image, in the development of a better version of a good image, of setting foot to trail to seek new images, of sitting to wait for the light, and, waiting, seeing more and more and more than I imagined was there at the outset.

I cannot not make art.