The DreamDance series is my first exhibit of photography. I have always been a painter and printmaker, and used the camera only for reference in my work.

During the past few years, after having become competent enough with the computer program Adobe Photoshop and having a Cintique Wacom tablet with a stylus for a mouse to draw with, I began to sense the possibilities inherent in the digital photographic process itself. Using digital images offers me a range of tools and a different sort of freedom than I had imagined possible.

The computer allows me to revisit the history of each image, and allows me to follow tangents with great ease. My paintings are labor intensive. I have worked in extended series of a single image, as it was the only way to follow the same thread in a work's infinite seeming inevitabilities.

I love open-ended playing with images and themes, and while photography lacks the touch of the human hand, it can be a seamless counterpart to painting where images are constructed in the mind.

The Dream Dance series developed from a series of photographs that I took of my friend, dancer and choreographer Joanna McDermid, in my studio. She danced but stopped to hold each pose at my request. I have always found her a most compelling and fascinating model, and she has posed for paintings and photographs on several occasions.

As the project developed, I envisioned the theme of the dance in landscape. As well, each image would at least begin with a divided format on the page (as I had used in several series of paintings, most recently Ear to the Ground, Nose to the Wind), suggestive of the dualities that we as human beings suffer--- inside/outside, conscious/unconscious, light/dark, and so on.

Once I had gathered a great many photographs of the dancer and elements of landscapes, I was able simply to draw and play with the images on the computer as if they were drawings or paintings on a page. I bought my own large format printer with archival inks and very high resolution, allowing me to experiment with the prints and thus have full control over each work.

As each DreamDance image became complete, I locked the file on it and committed to print an edition limited to 15 signed and numbered copies. Then, the file is destroyed.