Though I am drawn to scenes of natural beauty, my photographs speak more to the deeper currents that are the purview of all artists: color and line, form and composition and, ultimately, using the medium and an individual moment to express a universal inward significance.

Like the Hudson River School artists of the 19th century, I find inspiration in the natural beauty around us. Though one faction of these accomplished painters created their art as metaphor for larger spiritual or philosophical beliefs, another group, Asher Durand most notable among them, sought to express the sublime more simply and directly.

John Driscoll, in the book about the Hudson River School painters, "All That Is Glorious Around Us," notes that Durand..."aspired to an expression of life and emotion related to but independent of, and more enduring than, man's experience."

In the photographs I have made of the Shawangunk Ridge, my motivation is similar to Durand's — a scene is rendered and realized on one level, but holds within it more than a record or document of nature at a particular moment, even more than I could intend as I release the shutter.

I was contacted not long ago by a curator at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts who was assembling a show of Hudson River School paintings, among them a sketch by the artist John Hermann Carmiencke she had been unable to identify. She recognized the scene among the photos I have displayed on my website and wrote to me for help. I verified the location of my photo, and of Carmienke's sketch and by way of thanks she sent me a copy of his rendering.

Here is a view of the scene separated by a span of 135 years.

I suddenly knew more personally than intellectually, the truly enduring power of the landscape and its timeless influence on a part of us that we all share in common.