Before I began my UX career I was a fine artist in Southern California.
I have been making some form of art as long as I can remember. When I was a kid I demonstrated some facility with drawing and so my mom began lugging me to art classes around San Diego.
I loved it. I remember learning to draw animals from an old book that demonstrated the technique of using geometric shapes to build up the form. I’ve always had a pretty analytical bent by nature so this approach appealed to me. I drew animals and dungeons and dragons characters, I filled my school notebooks with cartoons and sketches. I copied DaVinci sketches and then graduated to precise renderings of Jimi Hendrix and The Who.
In college I learned about Arshile Gorky and his self-apprenticeship. Rather than copying other artists works he taught himself to create new works in their style. And he focused on his contemporaries rather than Old Masters. I liked this approach. I began studying Francis Bacon and Leon Golub. I adored aspects of their violent works but with my own vision.
Early Paintings
My earliest mature work was driven by my interest in literature. I remember deciding I wanted to make paintings like Dostoevski novels. As long as I read a lot, painted a lot and lived an alert life I’d be like a cauldron of experiences that would steep like ingredients in a stew. I’d make paintings with depth. Well that was the theory. These paintings blurred the line between fine art and illustration.
Violent/Wound Paintings
I moved to Los Angeles to pursue painting shortly after the Rodney King riots. The city was extremely tense. I witnessed and was a victim of violence. But these paintings were more about living in a wounded culture in which violence and conflict were routinely accepted.
Computer Interface Paintings
Violence felt like a dead end subject and I got tired of dwelling on it. I became fascinated by the computer interface. I was interested in the virtual analogies to physical activies like cutting and pasting and cloning parts of images. I created a library of woodblock representations of the computer interface and used these to print windows on paper and canvas that I could use to make the virtual physical.
Computer Interface Paintings
Eventually I began integrating computer chat screens into my paintings. I was fascinated by mundanity of our online interactions. The interplay between our interior and exterior world.
