I was born and raised in the bible-belt spending a majority of my youth in the Kansas City Metro area and eventually going to college at Truman State University where I graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing.  However, even during my college education my mind was riddled with black and white images of the female form, leaving me with the desire to present them to the world.  Luckily my visions and the discovery of photography were married together when I took a community college class in St. Louis, Missouri and later advanced my knowledge of photography and light through reading and experimentation in Portland, Oregon.   For five years Portland provided a wonderfully open environment where networking and learning were made easy, however, the Midwest is and always has been my home, so in 2005 I and my family returned.

I am intrigued by the beauty of that form that is at once unique to the individual while also archetypal to humanity.  Each photograph to varying degrees deals with the tension between the individuality of the person and the universality of the female form.  In some, the individual is the most present element of the work.  In others, the beauty and universality of the form is the primary subject.

In many of my works, the use of light within a studio is my sole aid in uncovering the sublime of the female form.  Light and dark play against the line of the body to make it more pleasing to the eye and yet still “natural” and without artificiality.  The beauty I strive to uncover is not meant to be seen as primarily sexual, but rather an appreciation of female beauty without particular reference to sex.  It is the beauty of the gender that is present; a beauty that is unashamed of its identity.

Through the use of a nude form against urban backdrops, the form itself is elevated as it is set among the surroundings.  It is a harsh contradiction between beauty that occurs naturally with the stark man-made environment in which many of us choose to live. What is natural and what is contrived, and the interaction between the two is a startling juxtaposition and the desired outcome is further appreciation of the natural.  .

What you see here is the culmination of a lifetime of love, learning, and friendship as I share my interest in the female form with you.  The contradicting tensions of the individual versus archetype, natural versus contrived, are unified in the central theme to find the unique beauty that is in every female; a beauty that is there to be seen and appreciated, but not always found.  It was my quest to always uncover this beauty.