I began taking pictures when I was five and won a brownie box camera in a radio contest. I was at the kitchen table eating my lunch of Campbell's tomato soup when they announced my name. Aside from getting a badly distorted notion of how easy it was to win things, I discovered (or rather people told me) I was good at taking pictures. I didn't know what they meant by this until I found out that not everybody could do it. I enjoyed taking “goodâ€pictures but there was something missing. Capturing on film what I had seen was not really what I wanted. What I really wanted was to be a painter but I wasn't very adept at it. Plus, there were many naysayers quick to warn me of the economic insecurities involved in trying to become a painter. (So completely missing the point, I guess, I became a writer instead.) Years later, I stopped being able to write because that required solitude and silence, neither of which I had anymore. I went back to photography, still not satisfied with taking pictures of things as they are. I wanted to create pictures that existed in my imagination. I was saved by technology: The computer, Photoshop, the digital SLR. Sometimes I take a picture of something as it exists in the world and I leave it unaltered. I am much more objective about these pictures than the ones I create from my imagination. The pictures I create are my paintings.