Making art has been my passion for as long as I can remember. I fell in love with the idea of painting when I was six years old during a visit to my Great Uncle Harold Wahl’s studio in Bellingham, Washington. To me that studio was a magical world of color, exploration, and smell. The sharp smell of turpentine saturated my being and I wanted to be a painter!

My other Great Uncle, Ralph Wahl, was a master photographer whose subject was the great rivers of the Pacific Northwest and the dedicated anglers who fly-fished them. The arrival of his Christmas card, featuring one of his photos, was always an exciting part of the holiday season. Ralph’s photos, accompanied by the lyrical commentary on the life of a river by angler-author, Roderick Haig-Brown, were published in a book they titled, “Come Wade the River.” The photos and words in that book captured the light, life, and emotion of a river, and inspired me to want to express my own devotion and awe for the beauty I saw in the world around me.

I took art classes in school, but I just couldn’t seem to capture what I felt and saw in paint. I never quite got around to painting, but I did take photos to record ideas for someday paintings. Many years, and thousands of photos later, along came Adobe Photoshop, and the possibilities it presented for making art from my photos thrilled me. My goal became to find a way to use my computer as my artistic tool, to manipulate and give those photos my own creative touch, and to finally begin to express myself as the artist I dreamed of becoming.

I struggled to get what I saw on paper to match what I saw on the computer. At one point, I became so frustrated that I very nearly threw it all away – art, photography, all of it! In the end, or maybe the beginning, all that turmoil brought me to finally realize that I didn’t want it all perfect. I discovered that a little bit of guessing between the image I saw on the monitor and what happened when the printer’s ink hit the paper provided me with the truly magical moment, the excitement and the discovery of making art. It’s that wonderful little bit of surprise at the creation of a new piece of art that feeds my soul.

I have finally developed a digital manipulation technique that allows me to use the photos I take to produce images that feel like paintings. I love highly saturated color, so I play with the images to find the beauty hidden in the mundane. These are photographs, but they aren’t, and that is unbelievably exciting to the artist-in-me who has desired for so long to be able to paint.