what slips by

To me the treasure is in what slips by. The error is the treasure. —Arlene Gale Milgram

I started this series in 2024. I was staying at an old-fashioned inn and had just taken a shower after a long day of driving. My eye was drawn to the condensation on a window pane and to the abstract composition emerging in droplets on the heirloom glass. Only later when I looked at the photograph I had taken did I see the traces of a human touch. The invisible streaks left by whoever had cleaned the window were revealed as lines and swirls. The marks looked like brush strokes left by an unknown painter. The final flourish of the artist was a slash of white at the bottom of the picture, a random drip perhaps, or the tail end of an accidental question mark. The image became for me an allegory of “what slips by” — the ephemeral traces and impressions we leave behind, the connections we miss or fail to see before they disappear. This is the concept inspiring this ongoing body of work.