Rick Gillihan Drawing, painting and sculpture was my first interests in art. The last couple of years in photography I’ve been shooting abstracts of nature. I enjoy creating an image that gains the viewers attention at first sight because of the shapes and colors, and only secondarily is recognized as the realistic subject, as what it is. My first art classes were in college in 1967, where my focus was on painting and sculpture. After my second year of college I left and in my late 20’s I went back to school, majoring in graphic design. The focus of the design department was on lattice systems and lattice deformations, such as found in nature. I also began to teach myself black and white film developing and printing and how to shoot with a 4x5 camera. In 1980 I opened a small photo studio in Kansas City, Missouri doing largely 4x5 product photography and 35mm model composites. About 10 years later I started also doing graphics again but this time using a computer instead of a drawing table. I stopped doing photography in the mid 1990s and didn’t pick up a camera again with any intent until 2014. Since then most of what I shoot is nature, some of it abstract and some of it hopefully accurate representations of nature.