I want my art to work with issues and forms I see all around me here on earth, and which I also see in artifacts, images, mathematics and theory that we create as we concern ourselves with distant dimensions and times of the universe. These concerns are vital to our lives and important for both our science and art. Yet my methods are those of art, not those of science. Yet these art methods are as important to us as are our science methods.

Views of Istabul - 2007

I have been photographing the natural world for over forty years.  Beginning with travel photography, I have focused more and more on the landscape and the underwaterscape for my inspiration.  An avid SCUBA diver since 1979, I began underwater photography in 1991.  I find that nature is far more creative and surprising than are humans, and the beauty and complexity of nature is unsurpassed.  I look for nature’s myriad colors, textures and complex patterns, especially in those moments that are fleeting and never to be repeated.  While underwater photography has been a major focus for the past fifteen years, since moving to San Diego in 2002 I have frequently walked our local beaches to capture the remarkable colors and compositions presented by our sand, sea foam and cobbles.  Recently, I have begun to create photographic montages by combining multiple images using a variety of digital operations, yielding images that could not have been created with traditional photographic processes.

I approach the computer and PhotoShop as a painter and printmaker.  The image I call Asian Marks began as an etching.  I have an edition of hand-pulled prints on handmade paper from the etching plate.  The plate was then placed on my scanner and I began the transformation form etching to digital image.  I used black ink on tan paper for the hand-pulled prints so there is little resemblance between that edition and the digital work.  In Asian Marks #6, I have scanned in transformed photographs, and this led me in a whole new direction and gave birth to Color, Space, Lines, Lichen; Red Lichen; Line Play; Lichen, Sky, Lines; Composition with Lines, Sky, Lichen; Lichen Hidden in the Shadows and then to Lines, Leaves, Lichen.   One can not see much of the leaves in this final image, but Lines, Leaves, Lichen led me to an entirely new series based on Ginko Leaves, that while transformed, are completely recognizable, but that is for another time.  The computer allows me to move freely from abstraction to representation and back.  The distinction between painting and photography is disappearing as we create digital images that portray objects that do not exist.   Medford, New Jersey 2007

I generally work in series and each series begins with a seed - a singular arrangement of pixels that will be transmuted into a number of discreet expressions by re-arranging the pixels. The seed image is invariably something very ordinary, something close at hand that I have scanned into the computer or captured with my camera. For me, art is a dance that includes artist, subject, and medium. Each contributes inspiration toward the final result as we take turns leading and following. If I let subject and medium speak to me and through me I also become the medium. For me the word "medium" is closely associated to its use in the occult, as it is my way of conversing with past, present, and future -  a conversation without words. http://www.dgkaufman.com