Most of JD’s spiritual experiences have come from walking in nature at night. The silence and the stillness he found there as a teenager gave him an awareness of a hidden beauty. The experiences he had there were so meaningful, it was obvious he should focus his life on translating that feeling to others. He just didn’t know how.

It wasn’t long before he was taking his new camera out on these night walks, and there was one important photograph early on where he accidentally turned the flash on and illuminated a maple tree in his own front yard. The photograph was pretty, but not extraordinary.

Years later while at the University of Michigan getting a degree in Music Production, he re-discovered that photograph, experimented with inverting the image to the negative, and gave himself goose bumps. When you invert an image, light and dark are reversed. The blanket of darkness becomes a soft glow and the illuminated object turns to paint on a canvas. He had finally found what he was looking for: a method to make visible all the beauty and stillness he felt at night.

Over the last five years JD has lived on the road hiking almost every national park and bringing his unique perspective to top-tier art festivals across the country. After a few years of spending his off-season photographing in Asia or South America, he moved to Chicago to further grow his career.

JD Dennison

Artworks by JD Dennison

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