About Film Sometimes

Film Sometimes is a art-based website that documents my participation in the visual arts as a lifelong study and practice. It is also the home of Art School Forever, my commitment to continuous learning, practicing, experimenting, collaborating, and teaching. Through both, I try to maintain a sense of wonder and gratitude in a confusing world—and perhaps make a little sense of it along the way.

I see myself as a student, an emerging artist, an established artist, and a teacher, all at once. These identities are not stages in my career. They coexist and continually inform one another.

Learning keeps my mind and soul fresh. Working with other artists is life-affirming and invigorating. Sharing what I have learned with other emerging artists gives me purpose.

Art School Forever

Human Creativity as a Lifelong Practice

Art School Forever is my approach creative life. Here, there is no final graduation, no point at which curiosity should be replaced by certainty, and no reason to stop learning simply because one has reached a particular goal. I am not chasing conclusions. I am cultivating discoveries.

Through the associate blog of the same name, I discuss how continuing education - along with its' associated successes, experiments, mistakes, failures, encounters, ideas, techniques, and occasional acts of mad visual science - make up my artistic practice.

Water and the Transphibian

Much of my work takes place around water.

I spent many years playing, working, teaching, diving, and photographing in and under water. It has shaped the way I see light, motion, bodies, space, and time.

Water bends light, fractures forms, conceals things, reveals others, and transforms familiar subjects into temporary visual realities. It is both a subject and an active artistic medium—unpredictable, unstable, and strangely comfortable.

Making art about water honors my roots as a Transphibian: a fictional creature only partially adapted to life on dry land, which helps explain my love of the water. I suppose I could have gone with a selkie, but they are usually tragic, and who wants to go there?

Mixed-Up Media

Mixed-Up Media differs from conventional mixed media by adding equal measures of neurodiversity, alchemy, and mad science.

Photography is my primary medium, but I make images with film and digital cameras in a variety of formats. I may print them traditionally in the darkroom, produce them digitally, or use historical and alternative photographic processes.

From there, things can become less orderly.

I sometimes augment photographs through hand painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, or digital brushwork. Leaning into my ADHD—a form of neurodiversity—a single work may pass through several distinct, and not necessarily sensible, processes before it is finished.

Although I use digital tools, I am especially drawn to work that has also been hand-wrought: work that has crossed the veil from digital process to human touch, from an image to a real physical object.

That's the mad-science part.

The evidence of the hand keeps the art human and alive. It introduces texture, accident, imperfection, authenticity, and personality—all of the stuff that is truly human - and all of which feel increasingly important in a digital age.

Meditative Alchemy

The meditative-alchemy part begins when the process takes over and develops a mind of its own.

At its best, I assemble the materials, introduce an idea, establish a few conditions, and then allow the work to choose its own path.

Intention begins the process, but letting go guides it. When everything is working, I am less a controller than a participant.

It's best when I am just along for the ride.

Background

Over the years, my photographs, artwork, and writing have appeared in galleries, exhibitions, magazines, books, and websites.

I have taught workshops in event photography, underwater photography, and meditative and environmental scuba diving. My artwork has appeared in juried and group exhibitions and gallery settings.

Recognition is welcome, but it is not the center of the practice. Learning, making, sharing, and remaining fully engaged with the world matter more.

Collaborations

I enjoy traveling and working with artists of different disciplines, styles, and levels of experience.

Collaboration introduces uncertainty, expands the range of what might happen, and often leads somewhere neither artist would have reached independently. That possibility is one of the things I find most invigorating about making art.

Artists interested in collaborating—or simply discussing art, materials, processes, photography, water, alternative techniques, or mad science—are invited to get in touch.

Sales, Prints, and Permissions

The photographs, artwork, and writing on this website and blog are copyrighted and extraordinarily personal. Please do not reproduce, publish, train machines on, or otherwise use them without permission. Doing so may disturb both the artist and his attorneys.

However, if you encounter an image, artwork, or piece of writing that you simply must have, I would be happy to discuss purchasing a print or original work, commissioning something new, or arranging appropriate licensing.

My email is around here somewhere.

Thanks for looking.