Portrait of the artist...© 2012 David W. Joern
late afternoon
J.Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California USA

From the earliest of times, I recall visions of weirdness, being uprooted from the wavey heat of Texas at an early age to accompany my parents and brother Dave into the post WWII occupation, some 14 years after, being stationed in Frankfurt, Germany.

Seeing the scars of conflict, I began a vision of where the world would be in say five hundred years.

One cool breazy day the family took a trek on a tourist barge down the infamous Rhine River, whereupon espying the terrain and ruins of many castles upon the hills, victims from yet another age of conflicts in the long, long ago.
I began to see things.
Thus I saw where again there could be Kings, Queens, Knights, Damsels in distress, boiling oil poured upon the heads of Knaves.
Plus know-all, see all frumpy little Wizards to instigate the madness.
I don’t know what Ma And Pa or brother Dave saw...
For me it was the perfect environment for an imagination to emerge.

I was always drawing something, not very well, through high school, then on into art college.
Through studying the old masters' drawing techniques, such as Dürer, Leonardo, and Rembrandt I began to formulate my talents and the task of putting down on paper in pen and ink (sometimes pencil) these sights I had envisioned so very long ago.

Countless hours of little lines.

One on top the other.

Some large pieces take nearly eight hundred hours to complete.

I have also begun the written transcription of this future avenue.
In time it may become truthe...

For all things grow through the change in the weather.

Portrait of the shooter © 2012 Lee DeForke Jr.
Fort Travis, Bolivar Peninsula, Texas USA
(Pictured with the nikon FM2 body and drive,
55mm micro-nikkor lens, eddie bauer daypack, and
bogen monopod - the best hiking stick you'll ever need...)

I remember being fascinated at an early age by my father's Argus C-3 35mm camera while the family was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany (...yes, along with younger brother Dennis, we were army brats...).

It had "real" exposure adjustment buttons for both shutter speed and lens aperture. It also focused with a dizzying, tiny viewing range finder. An alternative was to use the distance numbers on the lens ring, but what fun is that? Exposing the film was all manual, no built in meter. Pop did have a crude but effective Weston exposure meter, but I rarely saw that in use. The information sheets that came folded in film boxes ended up all over the place with me attempting to make sense of what seemed like cryptic photo techno babble.

Probably the best education one could have. While our parents took color slides and color 8mm movies, Dennis and I were given inexpensive rolls of Verichrome black and white film...

Compared to my "eye-level viewing" pink Imperial Mark VII, and brother Dennis' "waist-level-top viewing" black Brownie Hawkeye 620 film size cameras, Pop's Argus was the ultimate in high-tech coolness with its brown leather form fitted case and optional flash gun that fired off big bulbs. You could feel the heat from those babies ten feet away and many blisters were produced by grabbing those expended bulbs too soon.

It was during one of our annual road trips somewhere in France that I recall being drawn to shooting something other than wide open scenics, snow covered Alps, or our travelling group posing at a roadside attraction...a foreign license plate on a Volkswagen, a "closely cropped detail" compared to anything else I had captured...that feeling and vision remains as I tend to wander and "collect" the overlooked or ignored. Many weathered, derelict and worn. When caught on film these can make for some rather confusing and/or humorous pieces.

As an army family we would move every 6 months to a year...another house, new schools, new friends (Dennis and I were never in the same school at one time until high school when he was a freshman and yours truly a senior...). Luckily we had each other for company during these relocations, and the spread between us only three years. We were quite an adventurous duo during those times, wandering three different neighborhoods in Spokane alone: plus Frankfurt, Germany: Park Forest, Illinois (...a south Chicago "suburb"...): south Chicago itself: Kansas City, Missouri: Venice, Inglewood, Marina Del Rey, West Hollywood (Los Angeles, California "suburbs"...): and myself continuing with Hawthorne, Redondo Beach, West LA, Santa Monica (Los Angeles, California "suburbs"...): Capital Hill, Redmond, Mercer Island (Seattle, Washington area "suburbs"...): Galveston, Texas: Jackson, Mississippi: Baltimore, Maryland, and Portland, Oregon. I have a "travel bug" to this day...

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