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Why Landscapes and Laments? I originally envisioned this show as a celebration, in woodcuts and etchings, of the lyrical beauty of the landscape and the compelling geometry of the cityscape. But Lament has become such an important subject for me that I soon realized I could not leave it behind. I found that I can only celebrate the beauty of the natural world and the joys of living when I also acknowledge the ways in which these gifts can be twisted and broken.
 Lament was not always my theme. In my early years as an artist I worked as a painter, and landscape and cityscape were my primary subjects. Today I am a printmaker, and in planning this exhibition I looked forward to the challenge of rendering these once familiar subjects in woodcuts and etchings, with their comparatively restricted palette and simplified shapes.
But Lament has become a major theme in my work, my personal response to sorrowful events in the news or in life around me. (While I am neither a street protestor nor a letter writer, I am a maker of images, and this is work I can do to bear witness to sorrows.) Often the subjects for these Laments seem to thrust themselves without warning across my consciousness. This happened as I was working on the landscapes for this show. New subjects rose up and demanded my attention: soldiers returning from combat in Iraq, unsafe drinking water in the developing world, climate change.
The resulting combination still seemed an odd mix: how could I hang beauty on one wall, sorrow on the next? At that point I recalled a sculpture that has persisted in my imagination  for almost 10 years, and I realized that it could link the two themes. That sculpture, Wall (About Suffering), is translated into wood and plaster for this exhibition; it expresses a truth about our lives today, in much the same way as does the juxtaposition of landscape and lament. We all stand poised between delight and sorrow. Even as we turn to nature or human companionship for solace as well as pleasure, we cannot, in an age of instant communications, escape awareness of the dreadful realities of our time.
 And this is where I stand as an artist. I place myself firmly in that long tradition of printmaking which values drawing and careful craftsmanship as a means of working, and narrative and protest as a significant subject matter. I consider that I am called to bear witness to the world that I see around me and also to the ways that I understand that world. This yields not only images of beauty but also images of pain. I want my work to invite viewers to see the world through my eyes, mind, heart, and hands. I hope that this happens through the works in this exhibition.
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