"Abraham Joshua Herschel writes: "No one will live my life for me, no one will think my thoughts or dream my dreams. In the eyes of the world, I may be an average man. But to my heart I am not an average man. To my heart I am of great moment. The challenge I face is how to actualize the quiet eminence of my being."

Encouraged by these words, but without meaning to be presumptuous, I sought a way to "actualize my being"- to give form and substance to what until then I could only feel - and found it in art. This is the art I present in this exhibit.

Those who have followed my work over the past ten years or so will know that while I have occasionally experimented with color and exuberant compositions (as in my recent collages and digitally enhanced flowers), I eventually always return to quietude and simplicity. This I learned in my early years from my uncle Fernando, the artist who taught me how to "look for the essentials and do without the incidentals."

It was perhaps inevitable that discipline would assert itself and that I would tame the colors in my works; I began to feel that they were taking over the material and whatever I intended the composition to convey. And so I am, once again, essaying Nature- but using natural forms and objects as isolated elements in a minimalist landscape.

I do not profess to have a profound knowledge of Zen, but what I know of it seems to express perfectly what I am otherwise approaching intuitively in these works. I can only hope that in the end, the viewer can contemplate these images and derive from them the same sense of well-being, mystery, and peace that attended their creation.