Painter and photographer Rick Lieder’s art has appeared on novels ranging from mysteries and science fiction, to books based on the X-Files TV series.

Two Newbery Award-winning books, Princess Academy and A Single Shard, featured his covers, and his art graced two young adult novels named to Amazon.com’s Top Ten List of Teen Books for 2003 – Keeper of the Night and Buddha Boy.

Recently, he has concentrated on a body of work centering on ordinary backyard wildlife. These photographs capture the unique qualities of light interacting with the natural world.

His goal is a celebration of the inherent poetry in these small animals living their lives, as well as the poetry of their environment, the leaves and the grass and the light, all of it reflecting the amazing life surrounding us.

In the green world, all days are one Day, and evening is a dreamless moment. The philosophy of life there is quite simple, but expressed in a million ways: the twitch of compound eyes, the ballet stretch of a leg – or six legs, or eight – the fierce distension of a mandible.

In the green world everyone eats, moves, mates, dies, over and over, a tumultuous and beautiful cycle – though all of this is rarely seen by larger, more indifferent eyes. But no matter what bliss or catastrophe maintains in that large and distant world, the green world goes on.