SPOTLIGHT

Below are some of the highlights from my ongoing personal project 'De Lumine'. This series focuses on artists of all mediums that have either inspired my own creative process or whose work I simply admire greatly. Often, it is much more difficult for an artist to explain their work with words than it to just simply let their work do the talking for them. I'm no different, but I think I can get in the ballpark, so here goes.

I named the project 'De Lumine' because that means 'Out Of Light'. To me that is not only the source, but the substance of art that I admire. As a photographer, this is literal for me. All I can ever do is capture the reflection of that light.

There's another, deeper meaning to the title. Art is important. Not just in it's aesthetics, but in it's function. I'm not a religious person. I do believe in the basic fundamental goodness of people though. Art, functionally speaking, can be a way of expressing that. It can be a more powerful and effective way of communicating with each other. A way for us to feel how close, interconnected and vulnerable we all actually are. To me, the best art speaks to all us of our shared humanity. Of how we're all part of the same thing, of how much we share in common at our core. Those visions aren't always pretty, they can even be ugly, but they're human and fundamentally humane because of that.

A proverb that always stuck with me is "Destruction is easy, creation is difficult". It's so easy to look at the world around us and see nothing but us at our most divisive, most cruel and most estranged. We're all afraid of something, in ways we dare not utter. This work is about the people who confront those fears with love. Creating, building, sculpting, painting, writing and more, they show us even the darkest sky at night is lit with stars.

This work is fundamentally about gratitude. Gratitude to the people who make it their life's work to conjour a tiny bit of light, albeit briefly and transiently. The work remains though, it reminds us of a common story told millions of times over all over the world. It says, we remain, remember us and know yourselves. We shall not idly pass into darkness but instead, begin again, out of the light we all share.

De Lumine.