I cannot separate drawing from writing. Without drawing swallows, I cannot write spring. I am self-taught in art. I am always a student. I observe, I dream and I draw.

I grew up and live in Ankara, Turkey. […]

On a warm winter day when I was five or six, I knelt on a bench in Central Park and watched as water ran down behind a sheath of ice on the face of a granite boulder. Some ten years later in Ivy, V […]

There’s a line in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God that I’ve always loved. After revealing some painful family history, Nanny tells her sixteen-year-old granddaughter, “Put me down easy […]

My attention often falls on things that just happen to be right where they are, set down here or there, together with this or that, thoughtlessly, as we say. These are gatherings of things I happen t […]

Primarily a poet and writer, I came to photography by accident. I was on a summer nature walk in southern Ontario, Canada, when I got lost. It was incredibly hot and I had forgotten my water. My wife had […]

I have worked with children in Bosnia, crocodiles in Mexico, frogs in Puerto Rico, egrets in Bali, mushrooms in Montana, archaeologists in Spain, butterflies in Los Angeles and lectured on island […]

I grew up in Virginia Beach where I witnessed damage and destruction of rural and natural lands for the lie called development. I feel levels of anger and disappointment when I see gree […]

Some of America’s greatest photographers roamed the country by automobile. They forever changed the context of artistic imagery. They eventually replaced traditional monochrome with color, and they shot the u […]

On walks, I find feathers, seed pods, pieces of wood, leaves, flowers, sticks, papers, plastic and metal things, pieces of glass, strings, all object […]

Travel has always been important to me. It’s about adventure, experience, and cultures that are different from my own. Cuba intrigued me for all these reasons. In 2018, I felt it would be a fleet […]

I went to see the Juneteenth rally in Richmond because I’ve always been drawn to stories, to seeing things unfold. Beneath the grand statue of Robert E. Lee, a large crowd gathered. Songs were sung and w […]

Sometimes I am asked to compare current artwork to pieces of the last few years. I can only do so in the most general terms: the images of my newer digital paintings may be a little sharper and co […]

Yasser Alaa Mobarak grew up in Alexandria, Egypt. When the Egyptian Revolution started in 2011, he was an eighteen-year-old teenager. “The protest took place in Shatby Station, Alexandria. It called fo […]

March 19. It was the first day of spring. Cardinals trilled at dawn. Trees were starting to smudge pink, white and green. I smelled mulch, and fresh, overturned earth. Beauty and hope were in the a […]

Photography for me started as a hobbyist’s yearning for perfectionism and how to depict it using one of the simplest formats—the photograph—rather than any real try at becoming a profes […]

I’m a Los Angeles-based conceptual artist and painter. I was born in Jerusalem, Israel. Although my parents did not have any special interest in the arts and never painted, I started painting in childhood, […]