This is the opening presentation I prepared for my exhibition The Dynamic Poetry of Nature in Newport. The one I delivered was more impromptu and, as far as I know, not recorded; also, a much shorter version.
All writing and photographs in this post are my own works. The illustrations are AI-generated.
First, I want to thank Chasse Davidson, the Director at the Newport Visual Arts Center. Chasse has been a guide, mentor, supporter, and much more throughout this process. I can't imagine having a more positive experience for my first exhibition. She set clear expectations, communicated frequently, patiently answered my questions and created an amazing display of my work.
I thank the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, their volunteers and their board of directors for supporting such an amazing community of artists. The artists here a warm, friendly, and welcoming group in addition to creators of incredible and unique works. I especially love how many tie their craft into the local environment. There is an artist who transforms buoys into caricatures, an artist who turns old fish nets into sea animals and matts, and one who builds beautiful mosaics using trash and waste recovered from the local beaches.
My last round of thanks goes to the local communities and my friends. I always smile when I see the word, "friendliest" on Newport's sign when driving into town. Anyone can put that word on their sign, but few places can follow through with a reality that my wife and I are still getting used to. Not only did we meet almost every neighbor on the block within a week of moving into our new home, but we also still get along with everyone after a year of living here! I had friends who couldn't make it reach out to offer encouragement and send their regrets, and I other friends surprised me by driving hours to be there for me at the opening.
Thank you.
The process of astrophotography is amazing. The fact we can capture a photon of light that has traveled billions of miles over an unimaginable period of time, decode an image from its frequency and then present it back on a metal plate, is absolutely extraordinary. As much as I love the process and explaining what goes into a piece, if you ask any artist, I'm confident that most will agree it's not the process we follow to produce a piece that gives the piece its value or significance. Instead, it's the process that shapes the artist that ultimately creates that value. So, I'll start by sharing what helped shape who I am today and the art I produce.
I wanted to be an astronaut as a child. This was the time the Voyager program and Pioneer program were discovering new things about our solar system every day. I was so excited when I saw space images on the covers of magazines in waiting rooms and libraries and had a lump in my throat as I stared in awe at the distant flickering flame of the space shuttle rising in the distant Florida skies.
Then my parents made a decision that completely transformed my passion and priorities. They brought home a TI-99/4A personal computer with a whopping 16 kilobytes (yes, kilobytes, not megabytes or gigabytes) of memory. I was so sunburned that I had to stay home from school and the daytime soap operas for far too boring for my taste. We didn't have a game for the new computer at the time, so I picked up the manual to see what was possible. This led me to key in several lines of code in a language called BASIC. Seeing the pixelated Mr. Bojangles dance across the screen changed something inside me. This was magic, and I knew how to cast the spells! I was drawn in and began my programming life writing "Choose Your Own Adventure" style games.
Sadly, only two pieces of evidence survived that period to prove my passion for space. Somebody somewhere has a set of Encyclopedia Britannica books that are missing the second "S" volume. The space section was so huge, the book had to be split into two volumes and inevitably the one with space articles would disappear. I also have a plate proudly signed and dated 1982 that depicts the solar system.
Despite my passion for computers, I didn't jump straight into programming as a career choice. I decided to feel sorry for myself and stopped going to class. Instead, I spent my evenings in Internet chat rooms (Internet Relay Chat, or IRC, was the popular destination in 1992). I slept during the day. When the semester ended in the fall, the college informed me that I needn't bother return for the next semester. I was officially a drop-out, I decided no one would hire me except minimum wage jobs ($4.25 an hour back then) and worked at fast food restaurants, a bookstore, a clothing story, and even a pool hall.
I stayed at the pool hall the longest. I made $20 "under the table" a day. That gave me $9 to save for rent, $5 for gas, and $6 to buy a pressed Cuban sandwich, chips, a soda and generic cigarettes at the local convenience story. It is ironic, but the subject I disliked the most in high school was Spanish, mostly because I convinced myself it had nothing to do with computers. I took four years in an accelerated program and spent a summer at the University of Salamanca, so when I was filling out job applications and "second language" was an option, I checked, "Spanish." This led to a position as a Spanish-speaking customer care representative for an automobile insurance company.
I was hyper-focused on being the most productive representative and may have tinkered with my software a bit. That caught the attention of the computer team, and they hired me to my first technical job: night shift print operator. I spent my evenings swapping out ink cartridges on massive printers that were larger than refrigerators. It seemed every 15 to 20 minutes I was swapping red for blue or green and back. I began to research the AS/400 computers we used and the printers and discovered a way to determine what color ink each print job had. This allowed me to sort the same color jobs together. Instead of swapping cartridges multiple times an hour, I now only had to swap them two or three times. Suddenly I had enough "free time" to sneak into the developer area and "borrow" the programming books I found on various desks. I returned them before the night shift ended and ultimately was able to convince them to make me a full-time software developer.
I moved from St. Petersburg, Florida to Atlanta, Georgia with the goal of starting a new life and leaving behind some bad habits. I quit smoking, and met my wife, Doreen, my first week there. After our first date, she informed me that she had a full schedule: she worked a full-time job, went to college part-time and spent the rest of her time raising her son. I was the lowest priority in her life. If I could live with that, we could date. It was good enough for me. Despite living over an hour away from each other on opposite ends of town, we soon discovered we worked only a few exits apart on the I-285 "perimeter" loop that bypasses Atlanta's downtown. We met at a deli between our offices every day for a lunch date and I proposed soon after.
It was about the same time that I discovered the Pacific Northwest. I flew to Redmond for training on a beta product Microsoft released that our company was using. I arrived on a Sunday and because this was before we had the entire Internet on our phone, I asked the car rental employee where a good local hike was. I received directions to a ranger station where I was given directions to a trail where I hiked past massive old growth trees up to an alpine lake. I fell in love with the area immediately. I and assumed I would never be able to afford to move.
Ask me sometime about the Taxi driver. If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be where I am today. But that's a story for another time.
Many years later I was standing on the Tiber River in Rome with my good friend Bob, contemplating what it would be like to work for Microsoft. I assumed they wouldn't hire someone with no college degree, but a recruiter reached out to me, and I made it to the interview process. To make it work, however, since I'd already asked off for our 20-year anniversary vacation to Italy, I had to squeeze the normal two-day process into a single day and do it right when we got back. I mean RIGHT then. I flew a redeye from Italy to Atlanta, helped my wife load the car with suitcases, then went back through security and flew across the country to Seattle. I landed just after midnight and was checked into my hotel by 1 AM. I was up at 5 AM to spend a day of interviews in what was called "The Loop." The gamble paid off. I would work for Microsoft, and they would relocate me to the Pacific Northwest.
The year 2020 was host for my most challenging week yet. In the same week, I learned I was accepted to a new role at Microsoft and would be product manager of a flagship data product used by millions of developers. It would be an in-the-office and on-campus role, and I was well positioned to take it on because we were done with my nonstop international travels, and I had a Connector shuttle I could ride every day to and from the office and be productive on my commute. But the Connector wouldn't be available. The job, in fact, became remote. The campus shut down. A pandemic descended on our country and COVID-19 changed the world as we know it. My world was further upended when I got the diagnosis for the weird habit my arm had of twitching and tremoring whenever I was resting. I was diagnosed with Young Onset Parkinson's Disease (YOPD).
Stress is a trigger for YOPD symptoms, and the place where I feel the least amount of stress is on the coast. We re-prioritized and instead of moving sometime near or after my retirement, we moved in September 2023. Back during that fateful time in 2020, I received an online catalog that was like spam but so entertaining I read it. They advertised flame throwers, set costumes, massive knives, meteors, archeological artifacts and more I was very skeptical when I saw an ad for a device that you could control from your phone and take pictures of galaxies, the moon's craters, and more. But I had to try it out. This was the result:
I was hooked. Little did I know this hobby would lead me to meet a group of total strangers in the dark, ascend a little-known trail and encounter a thunderstorm when the forecast was for clear skies, startle a black bear, summit to a cloudy sky yet end up with my first "decent" Milky Way shots.
Nor did I realize it would give me a deeper appreciation and empower me to capture a magical moment in a valley you can only access by crossing a glacier. My friend wanted me to succeed so badly, when I began to wilt in the 100+ degree temperatures on the exposed switchbacks heading up, he carried my packs to the summit then came back down to lead me to success.
When I look at my pieces, I don't just see a cluster of blue stars. I don't just see the 45th item recorded in Charles Messier's catalog of objects to avoid because they aren't comets. I don't just see Maia and her nebula. I see a fuzzy patch I'm trying to aim my Sony camera at. I see I set of black and white photos that I know will produce a sharp, clear color image when they are combined. I see the faint interstellar dust fields that take a masterful approach with enormously long exposure time to draw out. I see a challenge.
As you browse the gallery, in addition to what you observe, I recommend learning the story being what's being observed. And I guarantee almost every observation of that target has a unique story. I'm free and happy to share those stories with you, but I'm much more interested in what the image evokes in your mind. I focus on mainly one thing when I process an image: the wonder and magic. Some of these targets are beautiful and the emotions they invoke I believe come from the soul. No, not something insignificant and random, not a chemical reaction, but an experience only possible for someone alive with spirit.
This is the Remnant's Strings. The Cygnus Loop is the outer shell of a star that exploded.
The upper left of the image is the Western Veil. The lower right is the Eastern Veil. The sweeping funnel adorned with a bright star in the lower right is often called the Veil Nebula and has many other names like the Witch's Broom. Part of that broom is named Pickering's triangle. I was moved to write this when I saw the image for the first time:
In the Southern Cross (or Cygnus) where a star no longer glows
Its energy loans the colorful bones that filaments expose
Threads of red and strands of green entangle in their space
The expanding shell of the star that fell and is no longer in its place
The Witch's Broom as some presume is just part of a bigger tale
Of Cirrus clouds, Pickering's Triangle and the Eastern and Western Veil
In space it's stranded the filaments expanded and twisted around the core
That attracts our gaze as we trace the maze, both amazed and grateful yet more.
To make a short story boring, things happened. We moved around. I bought stuff. I found my haven, but I did not expect that it would transform me. What was a hobby has now become a passion that helps me transcend the boundaries of Parkinson's Disease.
I believe nature is poetic because it is information, organization, and creation that reveals God's hand. Whatever you believe, I pray you never lose your sense of wonder. Never lose your curiosity. Never lose your faith. Remember that life is like going up the down escalator: if you stand still, you fall behind.
As my good friend Sifan likes to say: Carpe Nocturnum! Seize the night!
And that's a rap, er, wrap.
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