It was February 18th, 2022, and Edd Allen walked towards the sea with his camera, his footsteps seemingly silent in the chaos of the storm. Newhaven Harbor, a 40-minute walk for Allen, was familiar with many storms that would hit the coast running alongside the south of the United Kingdom. The strong winds caused everyone to stay indoors, and warnings advised people to stay away from the coast, but Allen’s curiosity drove him as close to the water as he could.

Once he reached the cliff’s edge, he had to lay down so as not to be blown over by the howling wind. He snapped photos of the waves, the sea dark with murky debris cascading from the frothing white water. Needing to retreat behind nearby cliffs often to allow the tide to go out, his day progressed — taking photos and retreating, not even checking his camera to see if any of the shots had turned out.

“The adrenaline was flying all day, so I was just taking pictures and then sort of retreating,” says Allen when speaking about being so close to the sea. “I just sort of had a feeling that maybe I captured something special that day.”

Allen arrived back home drenched, equipment wrecked, and covered in muddy sediment. The camera was destroyed by salt water… but two memory cards were filled with photos from the testing excursion. “I looked at them on the computer, and I was like, ‘Wow!’ It really was as I imagined. It was a crazy day,” says Allen when thinking back to seeing the pictures taken on that stormy day for the first time.

By Jamey Hecht, PH.D, PSY.D, POET

DANIEL KAUFMAN’S PAINTINGS are “something strange.” They seem to slice their way into reality from an unusual angle and at a stroke. His actual artistic process is nothing like that, of course. A similar gulf separates the artist’s own personal manner from the manner of these canvases as one stands gazing into them.

The artist is courteous, thoughtful, and menschey; the pictures are sovereign, primordial, and commanding. That asymmetry is one of many hints that this body of work and its master are the real thing. Daniel Kaufman is incapable of making a bad painting.

He is also getting old enough to have rounded that dark corner in every unaborted artistic career in which it becomes evident to the person holding the brush that extinction really is going to vaporize the visible portion of him, and the artmaking takes on a different existential scent. There is less worry, and more smiling; less hope, and more action; less future and past, and instead an abundant metaphysical now already hitting a few “notes” of the Divine as each sip of reflected light tells the brain’s optical tongue just what it is doing.