My father was a simple, hard working man with a passion for art and beauty. He’d excitedly describe the colors in a sunset or the drama in the works of the Impressionists. From him I inherited my enthusiasm for art.

During the Summer of Love, I followed the songs to San Francisco. There, Mike Roberts was chronicling the Hippies. He introduced me to photography. His influence was immense.

I began photographing the ghost towns and desolate buildings of the Great American Desert. There were one-man shows at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral and the infamous San Quentin and Soledad prisons. Looking back now, I am amazed at how easily pictures sold.

Eventually, my wanderings led me to Boston where I was drafted as a conscientious objector during the Viet Nam War. There were years of excess, efforts at making a living, attempts at family life, and little thought of returning to the west or to photography.

Thirty something years later, I was living in the Green Mountains, cleaned up, settled down, and drawn again to photography. Unfortunately, it was all too obvious I had lost my eye. It took over 5 years to slowly learn again skills that had come so naturally in my youth.

The first year, I didn’t allow myself to take pictures at all. When I thought I saw a shot, I would just look at it through the view finder. The next year, I began taking pictures around my village. Each year the subject matter changed. Gradually, the quality of the photographs improved. What once I had taken for granted is now a hard earned privilege and blessing.

From the beginning, my preference has been limited edition, large-format prints. In San Francisco, I worked in black and white printing onto paper which was affixed to a solid composite surface. Currently, I am working with digital color printed directly onto canvas. Of particular interest to me are pictures which evoke the past in the present.

          I am co-owner with my wife, Kelly L E Funk, of Gallery 160, which features our art and that of guest artists. Issues retirees face are of great importance to me. 18 newspapers across Vermont publish my monthly column, Aging in Place. There is a day job, too, working for MetLife Bank as a reverse mortgage consultant.  Fortunately, this takes me and my camera all over Vermont.

Most years, Kelly and I spend part of August in Maine on Beal’s Island. We travel sporadically around the United States, always looking for pictures of the joy and beauty which is so plentiful in this great land of ours.