Jay got interested in photography as art in the late Sixties (the nineteen sixties, thank you), and joined the actual fray as a photographic artist around 1970. That turned out to be a short-lived, ill fated venture, but he pleads youth and naïveté. Okay, youth and stupidity, but the multitudinous disasters had little to do with photographic or artistic considerations and a whole lot to do with crooked real estate agents, greedy banks, nincompoop insurance companies, and heavy handed Southern politics so crooked they call it "North Carolina" politics. Anyway, photography-as-art still beguiles, and Jay yields to the Muse's call whenever possible, reason and common sense and even old age notwithstanding. Jay's exhibited many of his photographs in the Midlands of South Carolina within smelling distance of the very seat of state government and within cannonball-shooting distance of the capitolith itself. The art shows provided opportunities to show off, even though Jay had to brave appearing in actual person at the openings. Now he maintains a continuous online art show, where sales of prints are enabled worldwide: RedBubble
Jay's not noted for conformity and doesn't fit well into any categories. "Mainly, I get bored easy." So, the body of his work cuts across a variety of styles, schools, techniques, subjects, and display media. Some are old and traditional, and some new and misunderstood. Some work, and some don't. The viewer decides which is which.
Often printing images in more than one way, Jay alters them as necessary to adjust to the medium. Other works are traditional photographs printed by technologically impressive means onto non-traditional (for photography) surfaces such as artists' canvas, watercolor paper, and metallic foil.
Jay especially likes images in plain ol' photographic gelatin-silver created in the dark. However, the allure of electronic output, with the color permanence of giglée prints, keeps his kitchen smelling more like food than fixer. Oh, and that's another thing. Jay's respiratory functions are extremely sensitive to photographic chemicals, owing to the years he spent in the color photo lab business.
People are usually Jay's favorite subjects, including nudes. He also likes the surreal, and creating abstractions that start as photographs of people, nude or otherwise, and metamorphize into something indistinct, but reminiscent of reality in some curious way.
Computer technologies have booted up an infinite palette of possibilities for manipulating the camera's imagery, and Jay delights in exploring those complexities with works that cut across both traditional and digital photographic technologies. Many of his favorite works are digital abstractions, which he greatly enjoys doing and looking at, ever since 'way back in the Seventies - the Nineteen Seventies.
As an artist and a photographer, Jay's completely self-taught. "Outsider," is the current term. He learns best by doing, anyway, and Jay's always felt that doing something - even doing it wrong - was a better way of figuring out how to do it than being told. Besides, there have always been plenty of books on the subjects, and Jay definitely relates to books. In fact, he'll miss them when they're replaced by electronic versions. But moving to his present apartment was complicated by the fact that his books filled up more than half of the rent-a-truck and consumed immense amounts of time to pack and unpack. A few dozen CD-Roms would have held them all.