Over the years I’ve been a painter, when I take time off from it, I turn to photography. I do have that painter’s eye from color and composition, and it is another way of seeing. These days I use my cell phone, although I still have my camera. Given my post-cataract surgery issue with not being able to see well enough to paint intricate detail anymore, I have the same problem with taking pictures. It’s hit or miss now, I have to guess at what I’m shooting and take a series of shots, then deal with editing them on my laptop later. I still get good images, but not like I could on my Nikon.

The longest break I took from painting happened in New York in the years after 9/11. I took up collage back then too, but the paintings I was doing were too much like what I saw that day and I needed to get away from those feelings. I’d also taken a job at a Soho gallery on West Broadway. I was good at that job and have worked as a gallerist ever since, but it’s hard to make art and sell art at the same time.

Hence the camera. There are at least 1,000 images in my archives, which I could probably boil down to a hundred really good ones from New York. I also have around the same amount of good quality shots the Cape, but I realized that if I was behind a camera all the time, I wasn’t living my life here. And besides, I wanted to paint.

So, as I chip away at the admin stuff and have no new birds for you, I thought I’d do a couple of posts from the New York City. archives. I’ll start with shots of and from the Houston Street pier, which was only a few blocks from my house. I was over there all the time, I found solace in the stillness way out in the water. It felt like God lived on the river. And maybe he does. Or did, way back then. I think He lives in the dunes of Provincetown too. Anyway, as Kevin likes to say, Onward.