Featured Artisan:

Noel Schweig

Noel Schweig's prolific photography career began as a teenage hobby. His avocation became a serious artistic pursuit beginning at age 24 when he attended medical school in The Netherlands. On photographic journeys around the world, he travelled to capture native faces and places, which were exhibited and placed in private collections and sold in the Madison Street Gallery in Middleburg, VA. The Byrne Gallery of Middleburg was recent host to a one-man show by Noel. Many of the photographs in current exhibits are selected from Noel's recent forays into the exquisite Blue Ridge areas of Virginia.

Noel seeks out beautiful aspects of the ordinary in daily life, using his photographic skills to emphasize texture, shape, and color in nature where they are often overlooked. Morning sunlight on tree bark...soft pale green of lichen on gray stone...patterns of frost on leaves...fog settling into the valley as dusk brings a chill in the mountains -- everyday sights that suddenly become extraordinary when seen through the lens of Noel Schweig. Selected works from the photographer's collection are framed and available for purchase at Black Rock Gallery in the Mountain Inn of Wintergreen Resort in Nelson County, Virginia.

Noel Schweig: In His Own Words

"Photography has been the centerpiece of my travels throughout the world to learn about and capture the marvelous cultural and scenic diversity across continents and peoples. My professional life, however, has been occupied with becoming a physician, a psychiatrist, and a practicing psychotherapist and psychoanalyst, while photography remained largely on the periphery.

"Then I settled in and near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. The visual rhythm and beauty of both the Northern and Central Blue Ridge stimulated me to turn serious and sustained attention to pursuing photographic opportunities in these regions using digital technology, which I only recently adopted. I utilize Leica and Olympus equipment and do not employ filters, tripod or artificial light. Despite being a resistant novice to the computer, I am able to create small and medium format prints. The larger prints that I have shown in galleries have been produced with the help of professional laboratories, which have allowed me to add my three cents and my favorite brand of fine art photographic paper. My primary subject matter is landscape and local color, literally and figuratively."