Balancing the Tides — A Newport Journal is a biannual publication of art and literature based around Newport County, RI. The latest issue, number three, came out this summer and contains one of my architectural photographs taken in the city of Newport.

The cover of issue three is below and please visit the Balancing the Tides — A Newport Journal site where you can read more about the publication and where to find it around RI.

A few months ago The Center for Fine Art Photography selected one of my photographs, Four Corners, for an exhibit at the Denver International Airport which begins today.

The Denver International Airport exhibits artwork throughout it's terminal and concourses and says they are "one of the largest public art collections in one location in the country." The exhibit runs through the end of July, so if you happen to be flying through Denver for the next couple of months and you have some time to spare, take a look at all the artwork and let me know if you see mine!

I've been a bit absent from here for the last couple of weeks, which I was hoping not to have happen. I will definitely work harder to keep the blog more recent. One of the reasons was some travel to California. More specifically to north of San Francisco. And with a few hours to spare on Saturday morning we took a drive more north into the Sonoma Valley.

I love wine. I love food and wine, but since we were in Sonoma, this is all about the wine. We stopped at several wineries, but by far the best was the Benziger Family Winery. I had been to their sister winery, Imagery Estate Winery, several years ago and loved it, so I knew I was in for a treat at Benziger, but the place exceeded expectations. If you're ever there you must take their $10.00 tram tour. It took us up into the vineyard on Sonoma Mountain, over to their production vats and into their man-made aging cave, plus it included some tasting, so it's like a free tour if you're there to taste anyway. We were and we did and the best part was they shipped the bottles we bought back to CT. Outstanding.

I got a call the other day from a gallery owner in Boston asking about some of my Providence architectural photos for a buyer in the RI area.

Of course I was happy to provide the gallery with some higher-resolution files for them to show their client, but the client asked for one other thing that I had never gotten around to doing for 17 years—an artist statement.

I've always had a brief bio or resume/credits list or an about page, but I never quite wanted to wrap my head around writing a few paragraphs about my art and me. And somehow writing it in the first person made it seem a bit more over the top. But I did it and hopefully people will read it and think, "hey, he's got a personal vision" instead of, "hey, he's got an ego." Check it out on the About link above and let me know if you have an opinion either way. Thanks.

Some things come in waves and a recent wave has been my newlywed couples and their parents asking for photos enlarged on canvas, which I love to do, and was even promoted by Southern New England Weddings issue as a "Great Idea" in their 2007 issue (pg. 318).

It's a little tough to tell from this online image (I've got this piece in my office, so please come by for a hands-on look), but below is a framed canvas piece.

You can make out some of the texture of the canvas and a little of that painterly "shine." It's in a beautiful gilded and stressed wood frame. It's a very unique look and I'm very happy with the printer that I work with to do these canvas transfers.

My canvas pieces are transfers of the emulsion from actual photographic prints, not an inkjet print onto canvas. Lab inkjet printers (usually professional versions of your home Epson printer) are great for printing on all kinds of papers, but for canvas I like the look and quality of a transfer. A protective laminate is applied to a custom print I make and then the print is bonded to 100% cotton, primed artist's canvas, replicating the look and feel of an oil painting. Canvas prints are wrapped around a wooden stretcher bar so they can be framed like the above example or even hung unframed.

I have also sold some of my landscape and architecture prints as canvases, mainly for the ability to be so elegantly framed without glass. Some of the businesses that have purchased my photographs on canvas have done so because they are hanging the pieces in open spaces with large walls of windows so they don't want sunlight glare on picture glass. It's a nice solution to a common problem as I tend to recommend against non-glare glass if possible because it always seems to dull whatever image is behind it.