Those of you who have looked at the featured photo of the day that we've been posting for over two years now...and who read my ramblins have read how I live a photographic life. Most of what I do and think evolves around making pictures. I shoot pictures for the local paper, I shoot pictures for my studio business, I teach at Allegheny and I make my own work on the side. Each year the faculty at Allegheny have a show. Since I'm a painter as well sometimes I've shown those, but mostly I show my personal work done with photography, not my commercial or photojournalism work, but the work I do expressing ideas. In recent years I've been making pieces using photography, but doing it much more like Rauschenburg used printmaking and painting. I'm revisiting old studies I made in drawing and painting and bringing some of those concepts back and mingling them in with new concepts. I'm currently working on several new ideas in which this piece, which if I'm happy with the print that arrived a few moments ago that I have yet to look at, will be in the faculty show. Its exciting when a new direction appears to me. Many ask me where my ideas come from and it is really hard to explain, but I always sort of feel like I'm working on that original idea that got me started in art many years ago and that was trying to figure out what all of this means...this life stuff. Living is great, but what are accomplishing in the long run and in the big picture? I was in a waiting room earlier today and I heard this elderly woman, who was pointing out a blue fish in the giant fish tank there, that "God is an artist!" You bet. I like this notion that the creator is perhaps in the midst of doing the same thing I am, trying to figure it all out and in the process making something to share. Of course I think the creator, or nature or God or what ever form of higher power there is is quite a bit further along than I am here making my little pictures, but if I can question on this level, maybe I can learn something and move on up to a new a level...I guess that seems logical...learn learn learn. Photo manipuation piece by Richard Sayer. I'm working on the title--but it'll be something like "Pour sketch 39: Study of a broken Beethoven symphony with God."