About

 An interest in art was whetted when I had the good fortune to take a history of art class from a legendary professor at Case Institute of Technology, the enthusiastic Harvey Buchanan. Much later, I took an adult education course at the Corcoron School of Art and Design, back when it was associated with the now tragically dispersed Corcoron Gallery of Art.  By chance, the professor was Slaithong Schmutzhart, whose charming sculptures had earlier captivated me.

 This page's banner of our galaxy mirrored in a pond squirming with life is meant to suggest the cosmic reflections that increasingly intrude upon one's later life.  One starting point might be the Devonian shales that line the famed gorges of the Finger Lakes. The setting shouts geology.  Heeding the call to learn more lends the long view.  Life on earth began nearly four billion years ago, when the planet was young, and has but a billion more to go, when the sun's increasing luminosity boils off the oceans. Human kind -- or whatever species evolves from us, if we are so lucky to last that long -- will surely succumb long before. The entire enterprise seems pointless.  But when a sentient organism, hard-wired for eusociality, confronts this fact, it must in the end conclude that the present life and all that sustains it, from the biosphere to one’s social sphere, is all that can really matter. It behooves us to take care.