Fe203

 To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.
-Paul Valery

When I enter a salvage yard, the compositions that await me are intoxicating. These junk yards are my private sanctuaries. Within their confines, I traipse through a maze of poison ivy, spider webs, tires, tubing, wires, and broken glass, careful of where I step. I jump over puddles of mud and oil and take shallow breaths to avoid inhaling the fumes. Searching obsessively for color, line, and texture in the rusty, old objects that surround me, I desire to reveal hidden beauty, see potential, and transform the old into new. I seek to attach new meaning to the discarded objects. It's a slow, methodical and meditative process, as important to me as the final image.

These sanctuaries are often hidden from public view either by fences, trees, or the isolation of a country road. There resides the abandoned, the obsolete. There is sadness in the discarding, beauty in the deterioration, and joy in the discovery. Everything is not always as it appears. There are life lessons for me here.

When I leave the junkyard, I take with me visual fragments, some smaller than a postage stamp, of old cars, refrigerators, and machine parts.