Life, to a certain extent, is simply about how willing you are to accept death.

Well this one doesn't really work out here. It's just too small and you can't see it. It's really very basic, but it's also interesting. It's just an intersection in Manhattan along Canal Street. Hardly anyone in the center is looking forward, but there are a few people along the sides that you can see, and the one Asian gentleman to the left is clearly looking at the camera. If this was enlarged to about 12' across it would be an interesting slice of life. Then you could mix it with other 'slices of life' (perhaps a wheat field in Nebraska, something from a swamp in Florida, day workers waiting outside a Home Depot in San Diego, fishermen along a pier, the line outside of a nightclub in Vegas) and you've got something. Will I ever actually get that printed up and make a work of art out of it? - probably not, but the idea is there, and that's good enough for me.

This is just a simple shot of a wall in Manhattan on the lower east side displaying an ad for a piano shop within. There's really no subject to it, but I love the color of it, and the balance. I find it really interesting that the eye kind of makes the stucco wall look green besides the purple of the painted sign. It's really not green, you just perceive it that way. And I think the balance is impeccable. It's a bit dark in the lower left hand corner, but then there's a burst of sunshine in the mid-to-upper right. And the black fence draws you back down to the lower left, but the black and grey graffiti pulls you back. Add in the rusty red-brown of the beam at the upper canter and it just focuses everything along with the one shiny piece of 'silver' fence capping at the lower left center.

This is what I try to do in my abstract paintings. I try to have different points of focus, but also lines (the wires and breaks in the stucco) that separate things and move the eye around. I flip the canvas end to end trying to find a perfect balance no matter how it might be hung - and this photo, I think, achieves that.

Artist Unknown, Brooklyn, 2010