about the artist

My Story

Before you decide how you feel about the new artwork I have to tell you that these new works are from the digital painting project I've been working on for several years off and on. I think I've perfected my tools and process to the point where I can no longer tell the difference between one of my scanned paintings and my digitally painted ones. The process for both is almost identical, but the difference is that I am painting in a 3D-generated environment vs a real one with digital work. The materials and optics are very much the same to the naked eye. The canvas looks like canvas, smeared paint looks like smeared paint, and a stain on the canvas looks like a stain. In fact, they are my stains, brushstrokes, and smears from physical scans.

Most people do not know that I had been very involved in the development of digital painting tools. When I was young I took computer engineering courses during the day and went to art school at night. Soon after my education, I moved to Silicon Valley to work in the tech industry. I consulted with big companies like Adobe, Macromedia, Maxxon, Newtek, Centaur, and few others, to help develop their paint programs, some from the very first version. A lot of my artwork was on the packaging for those products in the early years. The tools people use today like Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint, and Cinema 4D I had a hand in developing. It's one of the few things I am proud of accomplishing.

In the early 2000’s I began to get ill and almost died because doctors had no idea what was going on. I ended up losing almost a decade and my painting skills to what turned out to be a mold infection in my brain. This is why I started working with digital tools originally because I was bedridden for a long time, and it gave me some way to gain back some of what I lost. Over time I was able to paint again, but I still have a lot of issues that the digital tools help me with. I also kept working on my tools because there was no guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again.

So now I work solely with digital tools out of necessity. The vision of what I want to make has always stayed the same, it's just how I get there now that is different. I still have to decide what tone, color, and brushstrokes go where, only now I can do so without dealing with the materials, and chemicals making me sick when I am not feeling well. Which means I can keep working no matter what.

I don't know if this process will ever be respected the way traditional art is, and perhaps it shouldn't but I needed a way to get through my ordeal and this did that for me, and it continues to let me create my vision of the world. I will always try to do both, but I find that I enjoy my digital process much more, and the results are just as good as my physical art in many ways. You can decide for yourself, the header image in this post is a close-up of one of my digital works which simulates an oil on-wood panel painting.

I am still creating on a daily basis, I do not paint that much, but I have moved more into the creative/art direction field because of the vast amount of knowledge and experience I’ve gathered over the years I think this a good third chapter for me given my health and abilities at this point. Any work that I do now, I consider graphic design and consider myself more of a designer or art, then an actual artist. AI plays a very big role in my life now. I felt obligated as someone with immense backgrounds in both art and technology to be at the forefront of it’s design to help steer it in the right direction as a tool for creatives, and not a replacement and I happy with the major players in the field agreed with me. The tools are yet to outperform experts in their fields, while they are very good at basic work they can’t outperform a real person with a real understanding of the human condition. In that sense I am not sure it will ever quite compare, but as a tool it is amazing. I look forward to working with AI more and helping others develop their skills with this incredible tool.