Timothy Bulone Blogs

The hills above Tehachapi, California are lined with windmills because the wind seems ever present. On our arrival there on a long weekend a few months ago, the wind buffeted the car as we exited the freeway and parked at a local motel. It's the wind... 

I don't know why toys from a bygone era interest me, as a subject. I have always been a fan of history. I like to know what forces were at work when an item came into being. Toys made from steel, like the locomotive pictured here, were produced durin... 

Water, as a theme, has always represented the spiritual to me. For many years my dreams were of leaky houses (the spiritual trying to find a way into my life) or being adrift on the ocean, giant swells lifting me up and setting me down, or being on a... 

One of my favorite memories of Easter is the sweet bread-basket that held a hard boiled egg. My grandmother made these every year. One for each of us, the sometimes colored egg would be nestled on a tiny dough basket with more dough criss-crossed ato... 

Now that the time has changed I spent some time weeding in the yard after dinner. The sun went down behind the hills and a cool breeze came up. It feels good to move, to be outside and not perched at my desk as if something on a screen could save me.... 

It’s a dull gray morning, droplets fall from the roof, the morning fog having condensed on the roof as it passes by. So, I am going to write about this image, one of my current favorites called Drawin a Bead. Every part of this image except the ma... 

This one called Thirsty Boy. It is a composite image. The boy and well are from a public domain image and the abandoned house I shot in Caliente, California recently. The image is very much a metaphor for how I see my life at this stage. I see the ho... 

This has been a year of transition. In keeping with the theme of change, we have changed houses, purchasing a modest home in a quiet little canyon where the coastal mountains transition to the Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. Here, bears and mountai... 

They were in a dusty cardboard box at the back of a dark garage. I didn't come to the garage sale to buy anything. The real estate agent who was emptying the house for the old owners had promised Susan some small wooden tables and here I was poking a... 

Buying property is such a strange concept. On the one hand, it's nice to think "Oh this particular house is our home, it's ours!" There is usually a deed which legally confers ownership of a duly measured parcel of land upon which is a structure wh... 

This figure, clearly a dog, was found on an ancient piece of New World pottery in a Los Angeles museum. For hundreds, if not thousands of years, humans have shared their lives, hearts and homes with canine companions. For a relationship in which ther... 

We leave the two-lane for a single lane paved road that moves from the grassland valley up into the oak-forested hills. Summer has turned the ground cover a golden yellow and the canopy above a sharp, dark green. The deep veined crevices of the oaks ... 

I was a teen when I heard the Don McLean song Vincent about Vincent Van Gogh and his painting Starry Night. I had seen the Van Gogh work in an art book we had at home and found it hauntingly beautiful. Any teenager could certainly relate to the pain ... 

It is the nature of mothers to feed and care for their young. It can be fraught with peril, regret and guilt like many other human (and maybe even animal) endeavors of any worthwhile consequence. And yet mothers carry on, I like to think, because the... 

We took the road through the National Forest. It followed a long valley that drains into a steep and windey canyon with sheer walls that look like those sand-dripped beach sculptures, all deep crevices and spindly buttresses. That canyon opened onto ... 

There are a few key places in California where travel is constricted, not necessarily by traffic, but by topography. To go from Southern California to the Central Valley you must overcome the mountains that lie between them. Interstate 5 runs through... 

There is a place in Laguna Beach, California where the homes, quite literally, are on the beach. They sit at the bottom of a steep bluff and seem to keep from getting washed away only because they rest on rock formations that make up the base of the ... 

I was oblivious the moment that it happened. I suspect there is a precise moment in time when the Earth's perceived wobble around the sun strikes dead center and the day and night are equally divided and the promise of longer days lies inarguably ahe... 

Since I last wrote here I lost my younger sister and younger brother to cancer. I still find it hard to believe they are gone. I watched them grow and bloom into incredible people full of life and love. But their blooms faded early and watching the p... 

It has been nearly two months since I have posted an entry here. It's not that it's difficult for me to talk about my work, I can muster a thing to say now and then about it. But the truth is, it hasn't been in me to talk about it. You may call it th... 

We were just teens when a friend was accepted to Notre Dame it was agreed that if I would help him move, he would pay for my flight back. As it turned out, when sessions ended I often helped him drive one way or another for a number of years. Criss-... 

I confess that the challenges of my personal life affect my writing here. No life is untouched by adversity in one way or another, in varying degrees. The moment's adversities belong to people I care about and even though the burden may be theirs, st... 

Back then you'd find something soft like a sleeping bag to lean against, arm hanging over the side, fingers feeling the 45 mile-an-hour wind, nothing between you and the towering trees, a warm yellow sun in a big wide sky or a crescent moon hanging i... 

We had just crested a hill and were coming down a steep two-track trail that topped a ridge line, the sides falling away at sharp angles when the jeep driver came to a halt. Before us a dozen bison were grazing around the rutted tracks. The driver in... 

Tarnish and texture, I add these elements to some of my work. I find that it gives an aged appearance. It makes them seem more realistic, more lived-in, more distressed . It's not a coincidence, that in the moments of my real life when I feel distres... 

In places like this you feel your heart beating in your chest. In places like this the constant wind burns your face, if the sun doesn't do it first. In places like this the Earth comes in just a few colors, gold, blue, brown. In places like this the... 

Ancient art Jim had sandy brown hair and a hint of what once was quite a freckly face. His build was slight and he was probably close to six feet tall. He wore blue jeans and a blue chambray work shirt and snake boots. Jeff was more like me, shor... 

I only really know my grandfathers from stories about them, mostly unhappy stories of men with short fuses, penchants for liquor and coping skills that involved the use of fists. I'm sure they must have had some good qualities they passed along to my... 

The truth is I don't think I am particularly good at doing what a rose does...unfolding, opening to life. Does the rose feel as anxious as I do about what lies ahead? I could certainly learn something from the rose, who musters all its might and burs... 

The Colorado Lagoon is a wetlands that once drained into Alamitos Bay. It's surrounded on three sides by residential developments but on the north side opens to Recreation Park's golf course. I was driving by yesterday morning and noticed a thick lay... 

We all had access to the same materials, paper, paint, ink, watercolors, etc. For several hours we made art using all these same materials and, as you might imagine, not one of the finished pieces looked alike. Six of us, in a few hours, created doze... 

It's mating season. On a wide stretch of beach protected by the breakwater here in Long Beach, terns amass in the hundreds in the evening for, what Wikipedia calls "courtship." The cacophony of shrill squawking that takes place is nearly unnerving an... 

Alamitos Bay is protected from the wide Pacific Ocean by a lengthy peninsula and a long jettied outlet. It's perfect for sailing because the water is flat most of the time but the ocean breezes are plentiful and seem to rise in the late afternoon. Co... 

One day in July 1993, Los Angeles artist Young-Il Ahn set out in a small boat from the beach at Santa Monica headed for the horizon. He enjoyed ocean fishing but this day would be different. At some point, fog enshrouded him and his boat. It was so t... 

Trees. At the house of my childhood, there was the liquidambar tree we called a maple because of the shape of its leaves, it's seed pods we called monkey balls. That was in the front yard. In the back, the sweet and fabled peach tree, the avocado tre... 

Sure, the cemetery cuts the grass and keeps the graves neat but it had been a while since anybody brought flowers. When my sister was here, we bought two bunches, one for Grandma and one to split for Grandpa and our dad. I had trouble even finding th... 

You choose it every day. It's not like you wake up and your bed is on some gleaming game show stage and you stand up in your pajamas and a slick announcer asks you if you will choose it and beautiful show girls point to yes or no while the studio aud... 

We were visiting relatives in Davis, California when I shot the originals of the dilapidated barn on Covell Road. Tucked in among burgeoning suburbs, here the not-so-distant agrarian past still existed and on a quiet morning while the others slept I ... 

The Santa Ana winds are blowing today. At the bay the surface water is agitated and dark blue and the sand swept smooth. Despite the 80 degree temperature, the beach seems quiet save for the palm trees rustling in the gusty wind. The air is clear and... 

My mom was afraid of it, that much was clear. Long after my father died, she kept his shotgun hidden, wrapped in a blanket on the back of the top shelf of the hall closet. Her fear passed down to me. As a kid, the discovery of this weapon during a ty... 

The Palos Verdes peninsula is a solid chunk of land that juts out into the mighty Pacific Ocean like a rudder to the city of Los Angeles. I parked the car on top of a bluff there and Susan and I took a trail down to Abalone Cove. The hike is short bu... 

They close off a chunk of downtown for New Year's Eve. Bands play, people dance in the streets with all the hopes that come with the night. A young man with the leather jacket had a shy smile. He was in his late twenties, short-cropped hair, neat, le... 

Half way down Bayshore Avenue my mp3 player quit. Batteries. The sky was brightening in the east. I stopped at 1st Street and stood on the corner looking out at the bay. The water had the slightest stippling to it and it was starting to reflect the c... 

Although my mother's father worked in the Cleveland steel mills, there was very little money and as the children got older they got jobs and turned their paychecks over to their parents. Though she never said so, I believe my mom grew up with very fe... 

To walk around the streets of Old Sacramento, the historic portion of town next to the river, is to go back in time more than one hundred years. The buildings are much as they were a century ago but modernized in all the right ways to keep from being... 

I am sitting on a bench with my sisters-in-law in front of a touristy restaurant in Old Sacramento. We are waiting for our party to be called, a family dinner before we all go our separate ways. A man with a hospital wristband still on sits a few sea... 

I don't see my friend Olivia very often, but when I do see her the first thing she asks is "Do you still have it?" as she turns my head to see if I still have a ponytail. I do. My hair has been "long" for longer than I can remember. I say "long" beca... 

There were few stars in the sky of my childhood home, hidden by the glut of city lights only the brightest ever made it through. Still, in the long summer nights when we stayed outside until quite late, I could pick out the big dipper. I remember spe... 

I feel the cool breeze, barely perceptible, on my skin where it is exposed to the air...on the small triangle of my chest below my beard, on the back of my hands, across my cheek and forehead. The room is crowded with business people in suits, I h... 

We have been in a perpetual drought for so long here in California that rain becomes news. TV news weather people fall all over themselves describing this low-pressure system moving south that will bring significant levels of moisture. Our badly need... 

Today we travel to the desert. From our home we will traverse the coastal plain east, running parallel with the mountains to the north, winding through river valleys, climbing through a number of low passes. At one key point where the mountain range ... 

Sometimes I get inspired by the work of others. I will see someone else's work and think "Oh, I like what they did here!" It's a treatment or use of colors or design. And I try those ideas out on my own. An art instructor told me once that each artis... 

October 2014 This is a week for remembrance in our family, people we love who have left us too soon. Like my photos which are sometimes composites of different photos, today, I offer these small tidbits of writing, more for myself than you. They are... 

The sun is still far from peeking over the Santa Ana Mountains when I pull onto the 22 eastbound. The mountains remain black as the sky brightens. The river of red taillights flows silently, steadily east, like lava. I have a 7 a.m. appointment in Or... 

In a larger sense I think of them as the Mysteries. These are the things that happen for which the everyday rules of life do not apply. The strong sense of a departed loved one being near at hand, the I-was-just-going-to-call-you phone call, the unex... 

In the childhood bedroom I shared with my brothers, there were two windows on the wall that faced towards Grandma Tobler's house. Her house might have been 6 feet from ours, a wooden fence dividing our three-foot side yards one from another. The side... 

Not twenty years after American Col. John C. Fremont moved across the San Marcos Pass to accept Mexican General Pico's surrender of California, ending the Mexican American War. The trail he used became a stage route between Santa Barbara and Rancho S... 

Back when I shot pictures for the paper, the corporate office arranged for a photography seminar for all the reporters and photographers for all the regional papers they owned. The man who came in to teach was a great photographer, had published some... 

The sun had not yet broken free of the early morning clouds so it was dark and gray when I got into my car and headed west on Ocean Boulevard. I got to the first bridge, the Gerald Desmond, as the muted colors of morning began to emerge. My quarry fo... 

Esther told me once that she lived for some amount of time in a camp trailer in the San Gabriel mountains. Her husband helped her get the trailer set up and I think she hoped for the Emersonian experience of the sacredness of Nature (and possibly to ... 

Today on the bus two young women gabbed at each other for many miles. There seemed barely a time for breath, just a constant stream of words. If they heard one another I could not tell. I marveled at their ability to produce such a continuous volume ... 

Miles and miles of rolling hills fenced in by coastal mountains on one side and the endless Pacific on the other. The deep green grasses bow and bob to the music of the pressing wind which has carved and contorted the stunted, sparse Monterey cypres... 

It was my older brother who taught me to ride a bike. Perched tenuously atop a bike, he had me start at the curb in front of our house, one foot down on the curb for balance. He suggested I push myself along the length of a few houses to get a feel f... 

Driving north on Highway 29 in St, Helena there is a ribbon of cars. On each side of the two-lane road vineyards stretch to the foothills which are festooned with clumps of ancient oaks and the tall golden grass of summer. Disney could not have done ... 

In a few days we will celebrate the idea of freedom. The day we celebrate was begun to honor our breaking free from England, which used coercion to relieve us of our resources in taxes. Our Bill of Rights was fashioned to specifically address the bou... 

There must be a million places across the U.S. where old rail cars are hiding, slowly decomposing on lost sidings, relics of and victims to changing times. I have seen them covered in graffiti along the rail lines that traverse parts of Los Angeles o... 

In my early 20s I took a job as a camp counselor near Forest Falls in the San Bernardino Mountains. For a week, city sixth-graders would come up into the mountains and experience a multitude of things like the grandeur of a night sky, the scent of a ... 

I normally reserve this blog for subjects related to art, but not this week. This week I want to talk about the experience of love. Of course there are many kinds of love, the love between parent and child, the love siblings share, the love between s... 

As a child, holidays were spent at my little Italian grandmother's house. Tables were set up in her living room because our family and the families of my father's brothers who lived nearby would sit at one table for dinner. And on the table, a typica... 

My sister, Teresa, and my niece, Mickey, sat on the steps of the old state building facing Sylvester Park, a town square of sorts with a white gazebo in the center. Teresa's friends joined us there as we waited for the parade to begin. Three sides of... 

Very few of my abstract images come from paintings, some are digital art created solely with the aid of the computer, the rest are mostly from photographs I have taken. A lot of them begin as pictures of trees, plants and other natural things, while ... 

On my desk there is a black and white photograph of my sons when they were young, maybe seven and five years old. They are standing on a desert hiking trail, newly fallen snow coating the ground and desert scrub. The older one, smiling happily, holds... 

"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, "In this world, Elwood, you must be" – she always called me Elwood – "In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant." Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quo... 

We all have personal struggles. In the parlance of the day we call it "baggage." When I finished this piece I thought about calling it "Child with Baggage" but I didn't want to saddle the image with the weight of people's own personal meaning of bag... 

On a lonely two-lane road, shimmering in the bright sun, in a remote part of the Mojave Desert somewhere between the outposts of Flamingo Heights and Old Woman Springs Ranch, not far from the fabled UFO landing site called Giant Rock there is an inco... 

There was an audible POP a millisecond before the power went out at 4 p.m. I checked with the neighbors and their power was out as well. That was my hint to take Max for a walk. People were coming out of their houses and talking with each other. When... 

Tomorrow, this piece, Sanderlings at Alamitos Bay, and one other piece will be part of a silent charity auction. Now, I can't be giving away my art left and right, not only would it become a very expensive hobby but it would also be a very short hobb... 

It was an hour long ferry ride across the channel to Santa Catalina Island. I had early business on the Island so I boarded before dawn and was surprised how many take this trip daily, teachers for the schools on the Island and construction workers b... 

More than once I have trained my camera on my own sons in a quiet moment and when they discover they are becoming my subject give a look of tremendous annoyance. I admit that I forget the camera is NOT a personal extension of my own eyesight and yet,... 

At a place called Black Canyon, where the mighty Colorado River makes the boundary between Nevada and Arizona, that is where they chose to put the hydroelectric dam. It was a marvel of engineering that required more than 3 million cubic yards of conc... 

A few blocks from where I live there is an Italian deli that makes scrumptious torpedo sandwiches. It's called Angelo's. It's not a big place, the tables and chairs are outside on the street. Inside are shelves of things in cans and jars from Italy ... 

A strange noise, a staccato pinging growing louder and faster. My eyes open and the green numbers of the clock radio burn the numbers 1:06 into my retinas. What is that sound? And then I realize...it's rain! The pinging sound are individual drops hit... 

The bulldog is not a pretty animal. It seems oddly proportioned to me, it's massive chest and head balanced precariously over two relatively tiny front legs, the backside and back legs thrown in as an afterthought because, well, it is a dog and four ... 

In the morning, boarding the 121 bus headed downtown, I find a seat near the middle. When you have ridden long enough, you recognize the regular riders. There's a uniformed security guard behind me, the older woman who works at the Chancellor's offic... 

The city of Stockton, California, is struggling. Last year a bankruptcy court ruled it could proceed with its Chapter 9 bankruptcy. Crime and gangs are a problem and economic prospects seem to be waning month by month in a Western town that needs mor... 

In the last months of his life, I spent a great deal of time at my brother's house in the Mojave desert. Much of my time was just spent being with him, bringing groceries from town (how he loved ice cream), watering and doing a few chores, getting hi... 

An online interchange - Them: "Nothing speaks to me. Just pictures. What's your purpose besides enlarging your own ego? Just askin! Unfortunately "art" rarely exists. Getting a degree, or knowing the right friends will never make anybody an "a... 

This week wildfires are raging through the foothills north of the great coastal plain where we live. In the morning there is an inversion layer in the sky, the bottom half is the bright blue sky and the top half is a smokey, rusty red color. It remin... 

Sometimes the events of life wash over you. I'm not a surfer but the word 'wipeout' seems appropriate. We were taken off guard by an unexpected death of a beloved family member. So I totally missed writing here last week. You probably didn't notice. ... 

The wring of the old rotary phone could be jarring, and to have it wake you up from a dead sleep was like an assault on your consciousness. It left you feeling discombobulated. Phone calls at night were rarely good news back then anyway. If you had a... 

My parents never owned a new car in their life, as best I can remember. My father drove a panel truck for his plumbing business back in the day. I've seen photos anyway. The first car I remember was a white Plymouth station wagon, that car seemed a h... 

I sat once on the edge of a cliff on the side of a mountain. Before me, in the late afternoon light, was a forested valley divided by a rushing creek of cold, crystalline water and on the other side of the valley, a chain of ragged granite mountain ... 

Two of my grandparents immigrated to this country in the early 1900s, passing through Ellis Island. My little Italian grandmother talked often about her journey across the sea. She was five or six years old and traveling with her mother and siblings ... 

We called it “The Greasy Spoon” and, in my memory, it looked like a shack. It was a wooden building in what once was the middle of nowhere in Orange County. To call it a restaurant would be wrong, I don’t believe dining was actually part of the busin... 

I was asked once to write about my "go-to-drink" for a food website. I know my go to drink should be a manly sounding drink featuring an aged whiskey or double scoop scotch brand drink of some sort (can you tell I'm not a drinker?) with a name like S... 

Flying at 35,000 feet I look out my window and far below make out the snow covered caldera of a volcano. Washington state is part of the "Ring of Fire," the chain of volcanoes both active and dormant that ring the Pacific Ocean. Mid Autumn and snow a... 

Each night just before sunset, gondoliers take romantic couples or sometimes whole families out into the bay near our house. They row out to the center of the bay and enjoy the special moment when the waning sunlight makes everything glow in golden h... 

It was the evening of an eclipse and a group of us had agreed to meet at a campground in Joshua Tree National Park. Susan and the boys and I drove in to find a few of our newspaper cohorts building a fire and setting up chairs. We joined them in the ... 

I'm not sure how I came to love maps the way I do. Growing up, I'm sure I wondered what was beyond the confines of my own neighborhood. Maps told me the names of the cities nearby. Here on the large coastal plain where I reside, the streets are, for ... 

I was raised in the Catholic tradition, attended Catholic schools and religion was part of my daily life, sometimes as an actual class I had to take. I became familiar enough with the Bible to understand common references to it. In the creation story... 

They were all there waiting for me as I drove up the narrow dirt road. I parked in the dirt turnaround and zipped up my jacket against the wind, gathered up my camera and went to see my old friends. A recent rain brought out some tiny wildflowers, so... 

I think about the objects I use daily or often, you know, my stuff. I wonder if it becomes imbued, over time, with a sort of energy that makes it mine. I was thinking about that because of this image. Because most people have a collection of stuff th... 

Susan and I were standing at the edge of a meadow in the San Bernardino National Forest, the air smelled, for some reason, like butterscotch to me. The breeze was warm and the ground underfoot was a soft pine needle litter with scattered pine cones. ... 

I warehouse photos. That's a confession actually. I can't bear to delete them, even the poor ones. Several years ago, while visiting my son in Sacramento, I shot the tagged and boarded up wall of the Orchard Supply Company. I tried working with the p... 

I don't have any great insights into the meaning of dreams. Lately, though, I have been dreaming a lot about information. I wake up with images in my head, like a design on white that looks like it has been painted with a red paintbrush. The design i... 

In a singular moment, a heavy wind causes the seed of the larrea to detach from the branch upon which it was created. The seed's fuzzy exterior allows it to be carried along by the wind so that it might land somewhere far away from its parent. There ... 

There was a thunderstorm over my boyhood home late one night. I cringed at the powerful sound and was frightened by the flashes of light outside my bedroom window so I climbed out of my bed and went to my parents room. I woke my mom to tell her I was... 

It is our rational brain that allows us to do many things that our ancestors might have thought of as foolhardy or dangerous. On a daily basis thousands of people cram into metal tubes with wings and launch themselves through the skies at 600 miles p... 

Imagine a desert highway that stretches 140 plus miles between two burgs. the better known Palm Springs, California and the virtually unknown Parker, Arizona, along the Colorado River. Along this mostly forgotten highway there are a smattering of des... 

I closed my first solo show this week. Times being what they are, I was extremely pleased to be able to sell some of the work to people who were NOT my relatives or friends! I sold about one fourth of the work I exhibited. I have no way of knowing if... 

I believe there is more right than wrong about us. We are barely a few weeks down the road from the not guilty verdict of the George Zimmerman trial, which quickly reheated the discussion of racial inequality in America. It's a discussion that is... 

There are points of interest in the life of any artist. I suspect most have to do with recognition, when a parent or teacher, for example, notices talent in a youngster and points it out. The drawing taped to the fridge, a student art show, acceptan... 

I've spent a number of days recently in the Mojave Desert. In these days so close to the Summer solstice, the sunrises and sunsets are languorous and long and bear contemplation. The relative silence of the desert adds to the primordial effect. Until... 

Fireworks, even the safe and sane kind, are illegal here in Long Beach. But in the days leading up to the Fourth, and today on the Fourth, the neighborhood where I live sounds considerably like a shock and awe campaign. Police and fire department off... 

In a photography course many years ago I learned a lesson that has stuck with me. The instructor said that one of the things that makes an image interesting is the play of light and dark. It was intimated that as the ratio changes, one way or the oth... 

We were going to look at some land near Trementina, New Mexico. We were driving the old Ford F100 pick up, the one with the stencil on it that said Save the Whales. We left Las Vegas, NV and planned to spend the night in Las Vegas, NM. It was a full ... 

My youngest brother gave me a book recently called Strengthsfinder 2.0 and the premise of this nonfiction tome is that most of us have learned what our weaknesses or limitations are but we don't always know what our strengths are. It questions how ou... 

I was too young to go to Vietnam. On my 18th birthday I went to the little post office in Central City, Colorado, where I was working at the time, to fill out my draft registration. The tiny woman behind the counter told me "Oh, we won't be needing t... 

It has been surmised that what has differentiated humans from the other fine creatures of the Earth has been the development of the brain. And that development is attributed, to some degree, on our ability to cultivate food. For most of my childhood,... 

Moments before the fatal crash I was driving along the two-lane state highway singing to the radio. A small car entered the highway from a connecting road, I saw it inching out as I approached the intersection, you know, the way cars come to a stop s... 

In the early 1960s, we lived in the first phase of a new development of tract homes in Anaheim. Our street was incomplete, having just six houses on it, three on each side. The rest of the street and houses were added in a second phase, the street ha... 

There are remote and hidden places in the Coachella Valley where seeps or springs form small pools around which clusters of fan palms grow. Sometimes the water is quite warm, heated by the shallow thermal activity of this seismically active region. T... 

I had a couple part time jobs when I first went to college. One of them was working with my step-dad in his shop. He liked to call himself an "industrial designer" but he was really an artist who had found a livelihood knowing how to prepare pieces f... 

I'm not a great reader. I read the occasional book and, sadly, I am not drawn to fiction the way some are. BUT I am drawn to libraries. I was probably in first or second grade when the teacher led the entire class off school grounds. We walked about ... 

I am attracted to old (and often) decrepit buildings. Perhaps it is because I grew up in the cookie-cutter suburbs where every house looked the same and they were all built in the boom years after World War II. Old buildings seem to have a character ... 

Though I have lived within 30 miles of Los Angeles for most of my life, I haven't spent any appreciable time there. There, being a broad area much larger than its downtown. In fact, I would say I have spent more time in San Pedro, the town that looks... 

It's easy to take water for granted. Here in California, the quote attributed to the famous writer, Mark Twain, "Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting!" still holds true. There's not enough water to meet the demand here in thirsty Southern ... 

I took a seminar once led by the artist (and designer, author, keynote speaker, songwriter, actor and playwright) Synthia Saint James on what it takes to be successful in the art world. Synthia's colorful work has graced museum and gallery walls, boo... 

This image is called Brother Sister and it is a composite image. It is made from four different photos, three of which I took. The children were taken from an old public domain photo by Arthur Rothstein which was shot in 1942. You can tell by the sta... 

I spent some time with Susan recently in the town of Desert Hot Springs, California. It is located atop the infamous San Andreas Fault and, as a result, it is a place of naturally (volcanically?) heated ground water. One of the very first white settl... 

An email: "Nothing you produce is original let alone provocative or "stunning". Like millions of other digital artists your interpretation of what constitutes original work is laughable." It happens from time to time. Somebody sees my work and d... 

It was the early 1990s and I was in my my pick up truck driving south. She was a young woman, in her early 20s, long brunette hair with that mysterious hint of auburn. She climbed into the passenger seat of my truck, she seemed the perfect physical s... 

I had an opportunity this week to show some of my work during an evening event at the Aquarium of the Pacific here in Long Beach. As part of the curating process I submitted three images that represented "Evolution" including my Abstract 46B (shown h... 

My favorite trail isn't particularly long, maybe a mile and a half. It does have some dramatic topographic changes, enough to get my heart racing. It runs along the border of Joshua Tree National Park just south of the town of Yucca Valley in San Ber... 

Renovations were being made in the building across the courtyard from us. The small apartment there is identical to ours in every way. Upgrading the bath meant removing the existing bathtub which was built-in with a nice tile manufactured most likely... 

I don't know a darned thing about birds. I'm not a birder and don't know the difference between a coot and a grebe (a discussion that comes up more often than you might think, living near water as we do). I have been out birding with bird enthusiasts... 

We moved back to the city more than twelve years ago but there are times when I still miss the desert. Especially the quiet. The free-roaming wind passes by abruptly but the spiny, low-growing vegetation pays it no heed. A furtive lizard stops in the... 

Flowing water is not that easy to come by in Orange County. There are few places where there are natural riparian systems, most have been converted to concrete channels to prevent the great floods that occasionally decimated the coastal plains when t... 

Maybe it is because I grew up in the suburbs at the edge of Los Angeles that I find a certain peacefulness in rural areas. Just having completed a trip in California through the hills and mountains between the coast and the Central Valley I was taken... 

Although my mother's father worked in the Cleveland steel mills, there was very little money and as the children got older they got jobs and turned their paychecks over to their parents. Though she never said so, I believe my mom grew up with very fe... 

I have been attracted to the notion of layers lately (along with my perpetual interest in geometric patterns) in my abstract work. I think in part because I have been looking at some Native American art and Native-inspired art lately. I can't believe... 

My Uncle Louie was a quiet one among his fractious, wise-cracking brothers, it seemed to me. For as long as I could remember he ran a service station about a mile from our house. Back in those days, the steel behemoths that my folks drove gulped down... 

I grew up in the Orange County suburbs, in Anaheim, California, to be specific. Back then, downtown Anaheim was rundown, storefronts in the old brick buildings perpetually sported "For Lease" signs, graffiti was common and the people on the street se... 

I am missing the steadiness of life right now because of change. I will be the first to admit that I'm not always the biggest fan of change. Intellectually I know that change can bring the good too, not just bad, but I am rarely prepared for it, good... 

We make the trip up Interstate 5 from Los Angeles to Sacramento a couple times a year to see family there. It's a fast drive for a major state thoroughfare. The ribbon of asphalt is surrounded by the vast farmlands of the great San Joaquin Valley and... 

There is an old derelict locomotive a mile or so from the train station in old Sacramento, California. I know I have talked about it in this blog before. That derelict is the base of this abstract piece. Part of the giant cylindrical boiler and a por... 

The leaves are spiny and sharp and can make you bleed, the bark is course and fibrous, the wood itself is weak, useless for building anything of consequence and for that I am grateful. The spindly Joshua tree, native of the Mojave desert in the Ameri... 

The summer I turned 17 I got a job in a little tourist town in the Rocky Mountains running a little shop that sold dulcimers. It was the first time I had ever been on my own without my parents or my siblings and far, far away from home. The shop was ... 

"Uh-oh" I said to myself at the corner of Roycroft and 2nd Street. Shattered glass was all over the sidewalk, it had come from the door of the pizza place. It was 4:30 a.m. and I could clearly see the inside of the business was dark. I crossed the st... 

The way isn't always going to be clear. Sometimes you will come to an intersection and the roads won't be marked and fog will obscure what lies ahead. Things look bleak. You might just have to wait for things to change, for the sun to burn the fog of... 

We must have 200 vinyl albums in storage. I don't think we even own a phonograph (how old does that word sound?) anymore. I keep thinking I should find a record player and drag the records home. Dance to the now "oldies" in our stocking feet. Certain... 

I confess, I am enamored of geometric shapes in my abstracts. This image is actually a distant relative of one of my very first abstracts, originally done in acrylics (as you can tell by the unwieldy gobs of paint I tend to create). The original I ca... 

You've heard the question before. If your house is on fire and you can only take whatever you can scoop up, what will you take? What are the things that mean the most to you? More than once, I have heard people say they would take their collection of... 

This week I am mindful of change. Our courtyard is being invaded by fuzzy, long, thin orangey-black caterpillars. They seem to have a fondness for our scotch broom plants and in a few days time ate nearly everything green from at least one of the pla... 

From the time our boys were young, my wife's family would meet at a little hotel in Laguna Beach for a week of swimming and lounging on the sand, strolling through town and falling asleep to the sound of surf. We lived in the desert then so going to ... 

I was at the Riverside Museum of Art recently and there was an exhibit of different figures created by children. They were crafted from simple materials, straw, buttons, tinfoil, cloth. Human in form, each of the figures had a name, most appeared to ... 

In 1873, the Department of Agriculture sent two little Valencia orange trees to Riverside, California resident Eliza Tibbets and Southern California changed forever. I drove through Riverside today. I got off the freeway at Van Buren Avenue and drove... 

There is a site I like to peruse from time to time. It has illustrations and pages from books from the last few centuries. Until the age of photography most images for books were created with woodcuts, essentially pen and ink drawings that were mass-... 

My photography mentor, the late Phil Dunham, counseled me while I was out shooting to remember to look behind me now and then to see what I might be missing. I was reminded of this last week while strolling at the Nisqually National Wildlife Reserve ... 

You know what I'm talking about right? "Soooo," said in a lingering way, "should we go out for breakfast?" The question embodied more than one complete thought, it meant that it was a leisurely Saturday or Sunday, no one really wanted to cook or clea... 

I think it was contrarian and activist Edward Abbey who said that man NEEDS wilderness. I believe he meant that wilderness was the antidote to the ills of being civilized for so long. It's not so much that we need to go there, we just need to know th... 

This is a place called Punalu'u on the big island, Hawaii. It is a place where the lava once flowed right into the sea. At the water's edge, the solid black rock stands against the perpetual assault of the endless sea. Over time this endless interact... 

It's hard to think of Southern California without thinking of pavement encrusted urban sprawl spewing condos and strip malls like fireballs from a volcano, planned communities and their commuter-mobiles spreading like molten lava fanning ever outward... 

It may not be until long after I have taken the original photo that an idea about the image pops into my head. I call this one 'Three Trees' and I took the original photo a few years ago. The trees themselves sit atop the bluff near the Point Fermin ... 

Okay, it’s wish list time! Say you have won a brand new home to be built on the prettiest spot in town. The builder asks you what features you might like in your new home. He asks you to make a list of ten things you would love, things that would ma... 

I have seen the great blue herons flying low over the roadway carrying twigs in their beaks. They like the tall trees near the marina to nest in. I hear them squawking in the early mornings, as if they are antagonized by the thought of starting the d... 

I remember hiking once in a very rocky and remote part of Joshua Tree National Park. I was on a massive granite bench and atop the bench sat a solitary boulder that was perhaps four feet high. It looked as if a giant had just gently set it down there... 

It may just be instinct that a parent, and a mother in particular, does everything possible to assure the survival of her offspring. But I like to believe that it's love. A blogger I know described choking on a piece of candy once while his mom was t... 

My wife and I have talked about what retirement might look like for us. We have not amassed a great deal of wealth, don't own any country estates and our IRAs more resemble the little heard from Irish Republican Army than Individual Retiement Account... 

I am inclined to think of myself as an artist, an artist working in photography. But I enjoy experimenting with other mediums, or is it media? When I am inspired I pick up the paintbrush and paint with acrylics. I'm a total gobber, trowelling on pain... 

In the New World more than 2,000 years ago, the peoples of MesoAmerica (modern day Mexico) had a thriving culture that included active trade, religious and spiritual practices, war-making capabilities and pyramid building (among many, many others). T... 

I am not going to compare the present times with the Great Depression, except to say that misfortune, economic and otherwise, seems much closer now than in the last few decades. I keep informal tabs on which of my images get looked at more often than... 

I had heard of black sand beaches but could not imagine them having grown up on the tan-colored sands of Southern California. They are beautiful, as a foreground to hula-dancing palm trees, searing blue skies and the lovely green waters of the Hawaii... 

In its simplest form, a landmark is an object, like a tree or a fence that marks a boundary of land. From a given landmark we can tell where we are in relationship to the land. But a landmark can mean other things as well. It can be a specific place ... 

I confess that old buildings fascinate me. Maybe it is because I grew up in the cookie cutter world of the suburbs or because, especially here in Southern California, we are quick to pave over the old buildings to build something ever newer. It might... 

On the lonely dark road we drove south. We passed the last house miles ago, there are no lights visible anywhere, save for the cars ahead of us. My brother in law parks the car just off the roadway, where the man with the flashlight points. There are... 

I think about bridges a lot, about the difficulty of spanning physical distances across uncomfortable or even dangerous places. I think about the feeling of human victory in conquering such spaces with ingenuity, perseverance and brawn. I think about... 

There was an alarming study done once about the proximity of school buildings to earthquake faults here in California. The study revealed that the a good percentage of school buildings were built on or near fault lines. On the surface, it seemed almo... 

It was believed in the early part of the last century that the elephant seal had gone extinct. The oil extracted from the large sea mammal was second only to the sperm whale and so in the late 1800s whalers made quick work of the species and by the e... 

When I attended the artists reception for the "Red" Exhibition, one of the artists was doing a book signing at the same time, guests were lined up around the table where she would sign her name and write a personal message. Then the guest would hand ... 

It was a simple black and white photograph of someone's feet, sparing and unadorned....it was on display at the San Diego Museum of Photographic Art. I was struck by the plainness of it, struck by its unassuming force and was surprised to learn it ha... 

A friend, who is an artist herself, asked me recently how my art life was going. I told her about my 'Red' Exhibition coming up (it actually opens today, check it out in my Events tab!). She said she had hit a dry spell. I know for myself there are t... 

I don't own a train set and I can't spout any definitive facts about railroading except maybe that the railroads of the east and west met in Promontory, Utah sometime in the 1800s. But I do find the notion of traveling by rail romantic somehow. First... 

Werner Herzog’s film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” is an in depth look at the ancient art and artists of the Chauvet cave in Southern France. The works on the walls of the cave are believed to be some of the oldest in the world. The cave itself remained... 

It was a tradition to go to my Italian grandparents house at the holidays. My father's siblings that lived nearby would bring their families as well and my grandparent's small home would be filled with people. The adults would noisily gab and argue a... 

Prior to the commencement of the Civil War, abolitionists like Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth were utilizing the new medium of photography to further their anti-slavery message. I saw small photographs of them in a museum, their images burned ... 

There are these moments, I don't understand them, when I step into a place and a photograph is just waiting for me. Such was the case this week when I walked along a trail at the local Nature Center. I looked to the left and saw this cormorant sittin... 

Susan and I spent a few luxurious hours at Point Vicente Interpretive Center on the Palos Verdes Peninsula south of Los Angeles. The remarkable thing about the center is not the educational displays on the sea-life and geologic history of the peninsu... 

A few miles north of Laguna Beach, California is a small state park called Crystal Cove. In the last century Japanese farmers worked this land, selling their produce from roadside stands on Pacific Coast Highway and to the burgeoning city of Los Ange... 

The Christmas countdown clock is in the hardware store window again. It counts not just the days but the hours and minutes until Christmas Day. It hangs above their annual window display of a miniature town in winter, complete with a downtown full of... 

For a few years when I was a child my aunt/godmother would take me to Knotts Berry Farm on my birthday. She never had any children and I think she enjoyed spending time with a kid. "We can ride the dunkeys," she would say, not don-keys but dun-keys. ... 

I don't recall if I was taught this or just did it automatically, when I would jump out of my truck at a breaking news scene, I would shoot as I walked toward the action. I believe my reckoning was that a) it was better to have something in case the ... 

My grandmother's house seemed like it was full of them, ornate Madonnas with children, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Jesus too, and of course her favorite, Saint Francis. And there were more at church, in the alcoves with little padded kneelers for ... 

"When I worked for the newspaper we occasionally had these special advertising supplements with wacky names like "Meet Your Merchant." In a very short amount of time I would have to schedule and shoot photos for dozens of local companies to go with t... 

No. 127 is the mansion of Pio Pico, the last Mexican Governor of California. No. 144 is the Church of our Lady Queen of the Angels, the little church around which the pueblo now known as Los Angeles was built. No. 170 is the La Brea Tar Pits, the goo... 

I was traveling through California's San Joaquin Valley this week, visiting relations to the north. Along Interstate 5 it's not uncommon to see thousands of acres of almond trees, cotton, pumpkins, grapes, alfalfa, artichokes, and so many other growi... 

Jim had sandy brown hair and a hint of what once was quite a freckly face. His build was slight and he was probably close to six feet tall. He wore blue jeans and a blue chambray work shirt and snake boots. Jeff was more like me, short, roly-poly. He... 

The yurt is a round tent-like structure, perhaps 20 feet in diameter. It is lit by two soft lights attached to the wall on opposite sides from one another. Beneath each light on the floor are propane fireplaces with medium sized licks of blue and yel... 

Maybe it was growing up in a large family, maybe it was because my folks were from Cleveland, maybe it was because I NEVER or rarely had a few moments to myself growing up that I have gravitated to the quiet and lonely places. Most every day I walk. ... 

I'm old enough now that I don't really know if kids still make out in cars. My sons are both adults now and I would be too embarrassed to ask them anyway. But when I was in high school I was enticed more than once to go "watch the submarine races" a... 

In the middle of the Great Depression the Farm Security Administration was initially created to help the rural poor in a variety of ways including purchasing poor farmland from desperate farmers and resettling them in better locations. Photographers ... 

Autumn. The light changes. It seems creamier, softer, in the late afternoon. There are fewer sunbathers at the bay. After high tide cleans the slate, the footprints in the sand are distinguishable, one from the other, people are walking along instead... 

It's a mysterious land to me, Manhattan. I have lived most of my life in two kinds of places...the suburbs of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area and the incredibly rural and practically desolate Mojave desert, in mostly equal amounts. I rememb... 

For so many years our home was in the southern ranges of the Mojave Desert near Joshua Tree National Park in California. When we would go "home" to visit our folks, we would take the Twentynine Palms Highway (State Route 62) west and then south and b... 

We need not go far for the subject of our art. If we are true, the nature and personality of the subject will come through the work. This is Max. He is afraid of sprinklers and water hoses. If my wife is walking him and a man approaches he sometimes ... 

I know it happens because it has happened to me, walking through an art gallery or co-op, I see some piece that just stops me dead in my tracks. I literally feel myself stop breathing. It is some fantastic work...maybe it is the color or the composit... 

The end of the Summer...would come with the mailman. Our screen door would open and a stack of mail would land with a thud on our living room floor. Among the letters and bills would be advertisements heralding 'Back to School' specials. How I dread... 

I attended a workshop recently by Synthia Saint James, a brilliant and successful artist, illustrator and speaker, known for her vibrant and colorful paintings. The workshop was on "the business" of art. One of the students asked her how much time sh... 

My childhood summers were often spent at the beach. We lived seventeen miles inland and the summer temperature difference might be fifteen degrees between inland cities and the seaside. Childhood beach visits included sand castle construction, search... 

It was a heavy black cast-iron thing, the typewriter. The outside texture of it was rough on the skin. The keys, tiny metal saucers perched on thin metal legs, wiggled back and forth under the pressure of the finger before being forcefully plunged do... 

There are many lines of demarcation in our lives, most of them intangible, the line between being a reasonably decent individual and a psychopathic killer for example. Recently I was thinking of a less-than-obvious physical line around which a good p... 

I'm certain I have the same lament that every artist has...I don't sell enough to support myself in the style to which I would like to become accustomed. And truly, it has never been about the money, this urge to create. I feel it being pushed, from ... 

They were never terribly grisly scenes, traffic accidents mostly. I usually arrived after emergency people. I would hear the call on the police scanner and grab my camera bag and go. That's what a newspaper photographer does. There were car accidents... 

I shot this image last weekend. I was at the 100th birthday party for the Port of Long Beach. They had a photo exhibit that included pictures of the very first ship. It carried redwood lumber which was carted away by mule drawn wagons. But it wasn't ... 

Sacramento is the state capitol of California and, as such, holds a place of historical significance in addiion to the regular political and comercial activities that occur there Any city with "history" has a downtown section it has outgrown. I have ... 

I like shots of nighttime. The muted colors and the bluish hues create a surreal, dreamlike quality. Newer digital cameras seem much more sensitive to these low light situations. But this isn't really about equipment. It's about appreciating what the... 

If you have never seen it, rent the movie Into the Wild. It was based upon a true story about a young man who, after graduating from college, lives the life of, well, a hobo. He only works when absolutely necessary and spends most of his time traveli... 

By and large, my art has had a photographic lineage, that is, it has been born as a photograph and goes on from there. I have deviated a bit with my version of abstract art. Oddly, this image did begin as a photograph (of colored balloons) but I have... 

It's really not a ghoulish interest of mine, these old cemeteries, it's more of an historical interest. I will search for the oldest date I can find. Unlike the rest of the world it seems, we here in the New World can only take our history back a few... 

Even getting into the canyon is difficult. The state park will only issue a certain number of day passes. We hadn't known when we planned this trip that it would be the height of wildflower season, we had only wanted to get away someplace quiet and s... 

We are always learning. Sometimes the lessons are a surprise and sting a little. Sometimes we must learn them again and again and again, and even then they might not stick. Sometimes I think that's what Earth is all about, learning what is best about... 

Because we are accustomed to seeing things "at eye level," we never really think to try shooting from different perspectives. The thick serrated edges of cactus leaves become an almost alien landscape from the altitude of about one foot from the grou... 

I think one of the reasons I love photography is for stopping a moment in time. At the moment when I am taking a photograph I am convinced that I WILL ALWAYS remember what was going on just then but the truth if that I do forget. Very often, it is th... 

I shot the original image of this tea garden at Descanso Gardens near Los Angeles just this week. Even as the tragedies of earthquake, tsunami and radiation continued to unfold in Japan, the loss is beyond my comprehension. A poorly guarded secret, l... 

As a child I had a recurring dream in which I found a secret room in my grandmother's house. The secret room contained antique furniture, chests full of unusual and valuable items and a wealth of other treasures. I would wander through the room exami... 

If there is one single inspiration for me, it would be my wife. She is a constant subject, usually unawares, for many of my photos. I keep waiting to capture the perfect shot of her but I should know better. You might be able to catch a look (boy, ha... 

I am fascinated by the limitless variation in life-forms here on the swirling blue marble. There are creatures that live on top of and under the earth, in the water, in the air, inside other things that live on top of and under the earth, sea and sky... 

My son believes I was born in the wrong century. He asked me once if I might not be happier as a mountain man, living a rugged life in the wilderness. What he saw in me, I believe, is a love of history. But not the date-spouting kind of history that ... 

Inspiration can come at any moment. I'm no surfer but I do know that behind the wave you just rode in is another wave right behind it. Just knowing that, letting that sink in, allows me to relax enough to be open to capturing the next image. Because ... 

If you are a photographer, and I know this from my own experience, then you may be missing from a lot of the important family photos. People will just assume that you will man the camera at all the special events. the weddings and baptisms, the holid... 

It was a small path that had escaped my attention before. I had noticed the animal tracks in what appeared to be a run. It meant getting a bit muddy but I followed the opening in the brush and came out onto the bank across from this old brewery build... 

The very first time I visited New York City there was one thing I absolutely had to see. I waited in a long line at the Museum of Modern Art with thousands of tourists and art pilgrims from around the globe. We were each there for our own have-to-see... 

In the simplest terms, what makes art "good" is how it makes us feel. A pretty picture can be just pretty. But if it causes a visceral reaction, if it causes us to pause and look longer, or maybe look deeper, that is the key. Of course, good is a ver... 

My grandmother, Domenica, came to this country from Italy in 1905 as a six-year-old. She would tell the story of her transatlantic crossing many, many times. Her father, a green grocer, had come to America years before and earned enough money for his... 

The moments just before and after sunrise (or sunset) are splendid times for photographers, well, for anyone really. They are moments of transition. The subtle and muted colors and the deep and changing shadows, the wide sky and brooding sea reflecti... 

I find it easy to photograph in more natural settings. Due, in part, I think to my introverted nature. I grew up in Anaheim, California and "nature" was something far away. Finding pastoral settings is not easy anywhere in Orange County. Rivers and s... 

As a native Californian I have to admit to one tremendous flaw in my experience: seasons. With the exception of my time in the Mojave desert, I have always had to travel far from home to experience snow. There are no great forests blazing in Autumn c... 

I can't really say if it is because I grew up in the 1960s that I am attracted to the automobiles of the day. Like them or not, they do have a certain style not seen in the cars of today. All that steel, it's probably better for the planet they don't... 

My wife and I spent twenty years in the desert near Joshua Tree National Park. We raised our children there. In all the world it holds a special place in my heart. Life in the desert is not easy. It is a place of extremes. It is a place that strips i... 

Every California schoolkid studies the period of California history when the missions were built. This is often accompanied by a field trip to the nearest California mission. I was no different and I remember the incredible excitement of boarding bus... 

You probably know those moments, when the world is hushed and you are keenly aware of everything around you. I think of them as sacred moments...when you can practically hear the creation at work. I search for these moments in my life, I find, more a... 

I have heard it said that, generally speaking, people are often more attracted to photography than many other art forms, but not for the reasons you might think. Photographs don't necessarily command higher prices than other fine art. The number of w... 

Anyone who has studied art knows that there can be layers of meaning in a work. I am surprised how often I discover new layers long after I have finished something. Meaning was hidden, it seems, until I was ready to find it. Masks themselves have a l... 

As a photographer, the allure of black and white is ever present. The absence of color creates a sense of mystery in a photograph, it's not that our mind works to fill in the colors necessarily, it is more that we work to ascribe some meaning to the ... 

Technology allows us to see images of our children before they are born. When friends of ours shared the 3D ultrasound photos of their soon-to-be-born son, Alex, I couldn't resist creating a portrait of Alex from the image as a gift. How incredible i... 

After years of living in the desert, our family returned to Orange County to be closer to our parents. After making the move back to the city, I really needed a place where I could take long walks close to Nature. The most obvious choice was along th... 

I managed to finish a canvas over the holidays. The title means, literally, the windows of the village. As usual, it went somewhere unexpected, but pleasing (to me anyway). I cannot think of creating without feeling connected to Creation and the Cre... 

Phil Dunham was a retired cop. He was a great photographer too. I can't think of him without seeing him with his large format camera balanced over his shoulder as he would wend his way down some lonely desert trail or stooped over, his head beneath t... 

One hundred and thirty four eighteen inch squares of concrete, side by side, poured in the last century, make up one block of the Claremont Avenue sidewalk. On one side of the walk, white picket fences, cinder block or stuccoed walls, the odd un-fenc...