Raphael Sloane

"I believe in the power of beauty to inspire the preservation of the sacred in the Botanical World. I serve at the pleasure of nature."

The photographic work of Raphael Sloane changes our visual perspective of botanical imagery. He allows blossoms to elegantly defy gravity and to sit in stately portraits. In Sloane's work, flowers appear to radiate light.

With a background in traditional photography and a career as a motion picture cameraman, Sloane possesses an extensive technical and visual foundation. For the past ten years he has explored the use of the scanner as his primary image capture tool. This allows the artist to create images that are distortion free with infinite detail across the entire image plane. Archival printing is done in the artist's studio.

While primarily self-taught, mentors have been a major resource for Sloane's aesthetic and spiritual training. One such mentor, Sam Francis, the painter, told him to "learn your craft, get your chops, and then consciously put it all aside and let the canvas dictate what needs to be done." Sloane says it took him years to grasp the concept.