Why I Create: The Need Behind My Art
I make fully handmade 1840s Adamson-era calotype paper negatives and ammonio-nitrate of silver (ANS) salt prints at a single vintage window, using only natural light and 19th-century chemistry to speak about grief and endurance.
I create because I need to.
My work is a response to grief, memory, and the quiet truths that words cannot hold. Using the 19th-century calotype process—the first photographic method—I make each paper negative entirely by hand, one sheet at a time. These fragile, imperfect artifacts are not just images; they are moments of emotional clarity made visible through light and chemistry.
Whether I’m photographing the silent strength of a lone tree in Solitary Witnesses or the fading beauty of a bloom in Pictorial Whispers, each composition is rooted in slowness, ritual, and the need to process what I carry inside. The work lives within a framework of Resilience, Transformation, and Connection—not as abstract ideas, but as lived truths that shape how and why I create.
I choose rare soft-focus lenses and historic materials not for nostalgia, but because they reflect how I feel. The calotype’s softness and unpredictability mirror the emotional terrain I navigate—grief, longing, quiet endurance. These negatives, nearly invisible without light behind them, are metaphors for the unseen weight of sorrow and the strength required to keep going.
My work resists perfection. It embraces impermanence. And it honors the handmade—because the act of making, slowly and with intention, is how I heal.
I hope the images I create feel timeless and deeply human—intimate in scale, rich in atmosphere, and grounded in reverence for light, loss, and the fragile beauty of being alive.
Table of Contents
My Artistic Journey
My artistic journey is rooted in a deep reverence for creative traditions that valued mood, atmosphere, and emotional resonance over precision or realism. I draw inspiration from the Tonalist and early Pictorialist movements—artists and photographers who embraced softness, delicate tonal transitions, and a poetic sense of place. Their work, like mine, wasn’t about documenting the world as it appears, but about evoking what it feels like to pause within it.
This expressive, painterly sensibility continues to shape my path. Whether I’m crafting a handmade calotype of a weathered lone tree or contact printing fading blooms in soft window light, my aim is to create contemplative images that invite stillness and introspection. Each piece is shaped by light, shadow, and the human hand—intentionally imperfect, emotionally grounded, and rooted in the timeless language of subtlety.
A New Language
After decades of working with historic photographic processes, I’ve returned to the essence of what first drew me to the visual arts: the quiet presence of light and shadow, and the emotional weight carried by place. Through the handmade calotype and salt print, I’m not reinventing myself—I’m uncovering deeper layers of a path I’ve always been walking.
In this chapter of my journey, I feel closely aligned with early artists and photographers who looked beyond surface detail to reveal spirit and atmosphere. The Tonalists and Pictorialists—figures like George Inness, James McNeill Whistler, and their photographic counterparts—embraced softness, subtle tonal transitions, and the quiet poetry of mood. They weren’t chasing precision. They were inviting presence. Their worlds felt suspended in time—a sensibility I carry forward in my own work.
I also find kinship in the emotional clarity of American Regionalist painters like Grant Wood and Andrew Wyeth, who saw the rural landscape with reverence and restraint. Like them, I seek to reveal the sacred within the ordinary—to express solitude, resilience, and rootedness. Whether through a lone tree standing in silence or a flower bowing in its final breath, my work is an ongoing search for truth—not in spectacle, but in simplicity.
As I work with the slow, deliberate process of calotype and salt printing, I carry with me a foundation shaped by years of studying form, light, and atmosphere. But I’m not chasing realism. I’m not chasing perfection. I’m chasing presence—stillness, honesty, and the quiet resonance that lingers when everything else falls away.
What I seek now are images that feel felt—prints that don’t merely depict a lone tree or a fading flower, but invite you into the space between light and shadow, memory and impermanence, what is seen and what is sensed.
There is still so much to learn. Many flaws to embrace. And an entire world to rediscover—one handmade print at a time.
This is not the start of something new.
This is the beginning of something deeper.
In my personal Printmaker’s Journal, I share exclusive behind-the-scenes access to my work—from the field to the darkroom—and you won’t find these stories anywhere else. Best of all, the stories are free and delivered quietly to your email.
I release a small number of handmade prints throughout the year in limited editions. Each piece is signed, numbered, and includes a certificate of authenticity and a written artist statement.
Join the Printmaker’s Journal to receive early access to new releases, collector updates, and reflections from the studio.
References
Darmawan, Y. S., Piliang, Y. A., Saidi, A. I., & Mutiaz, I. R. (2023). Analog photography in the digital age: Examining transformation, alienation and authenticity in modern photographic practice. Indonesian Journal of Art and Design Studies, 2(3), 217–232. https://doi.org/10.55927/ijads.v2i3.11019
Benjamin, W. (1935/1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken Books. [link]
