Thoreau's Walden: "Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me."
Henri L. Bergson:''The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.''
''...exhibiting the spiritual beauty of our Planet, with an eye of hindsight, foresight and clarity.''
Having made a facetious remark in regard to spots designated as, 'Photo
Opportunities,' from where he considered a successful photo as difficult an undertaking as fishing in a barrel with a bazooka, Patric took on a bet that he could capture profoundly moving moments from the most generic of all (earthbound) sources... our sky!
His reasoning was basic. For him the sky is more spacious then all the lands and waters on the earth combined and almost everyone has seen it, a few even at sunrise despite a loss of appreciation after a very long night out on the town.
When interviewed, he candidly remarked, 'While beauty is attributed to the eyes of the beholder, what is not felt within, cannot be perceived... Period!'
Patric considered his sunrise/sunset collection of photographs to have the same emotionally provocative qualities as a Rorschach psychological ink blot test.
Choosing not to assign titles, leaving each image to be interpreted freely by the viewer without suggesting a choice of interpretation, he prompts us to relate individually to the symbolism of the moments he so successfully captured and challenges us to dare a journey up a path of colors, beauty and enjoy the emotional responses they provoke... from image to image.
When coaxed, he went on to add, 'Sadly, too many individual's appreciation of a piece of art is based solely on how impressed they were with the 'source' who declared it to be a "'Great' piece," or negatively, '...interesting... (yawn).'
When Patric was asked for a title for this collection, he projected a whimsical smile and replied, 'At first I thought 'Fire Skies' was an encompassing description. Then as I captured more and more profound metaphors, I wavered, and gave thought to, 'Do you see what I see?' 'But then, for very personal reasons - from a profoundly unique experience, I realized the collection's beauty lay in the simplicity of its truth, as expressed in Genesis 1:4.
'So, I combined the three and decided on, "Dancing skies," or... "Messages... under the dome."
After years of camera carrying, thrown in the back of his car or rattling among soda cans under his seat, he took its capabilities seriously and created an archive of over 8,000 dawn and sunset photographs taken in and around Franklin County Massachusetts, and Windham County Vermont.
The exemplary 1% have been selected to be reproduced and are among the finest examples of his work in this category.
Although these photographs are reproduced through the benefit of computers, other than conventional exposure and contrast adjustments, dust and scratch removal, these photographs are faithfully reproduced without any alteration from the original
negatives. Patric refers to this as 'Honest' images as compared to 'Created' imagery.
Patric remains elusive, but he does reside somewhere in the north/west region of Franklin County with his cameras, three dogs and cell phone.
November 1997
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