My Junior year, I met a woman. She was a painter and also an absolute genius with vine charcoal. She taught me about drawing, painting and most importantly about allowing myself to express even my deepest emotions openly through art.

This last was a revelation: The realization that whatever I felt like creating was "correct" opened the entire universe to possibilities.

Over time I learned much from her and from personal research. I studied (often at her suggestion) those artists whose work I felt was attuned to. I drew and painted with and upon everything I could get my hands on. I threw most of it away, proclaiming that it was "process, not product" that I sought (impetuous? 19!). Survivors from this period comprise "Phase I". It was also during this phase that I "invented" Xerography.

While my own style differs completely from hers, there is still some element of her influence in my every stroke of pen, ash or pigment.

I heard she's doing murals in the south somewhere?

A brief college career

Sometime around late '93 I registered at Mount San Antonio college in Walnut, California. I was out-of-work and a friend gave me a "credit only" refund for classes he'd dropped,: I scraped-up enough to get the materials for a couple of art classes and got a taste of formal training.

I liked it, but when the credits were spent I was even more broke. I left to work some crappy job but vowed to return - I did a year later, intent on a complete curriculum of the arts - I did well, but found putting myself through school on minimum wage a severe strain. I could not have lasted much longer that way.

Distractions

As requisites I had taken a computer class - it came as naturally as ever. I was offered a job on the campus tech staff at about $6/hr. I took it, but it wasn't enough to keep-up. I was still drowning.

Working in the campus labs, I heard tales of outrageous salaries for hotshot geeks, paid by obscure companies working on a thing called the "World Wide Web". It was hard to choose between starving in art classes and the high-paying (but meaningless) jobs I was soon being offered - in the end basic survival took precedent. I dropped-out to become uber-geek.

Part Deux

My creative projects have never subsided: I've continued to sketch and write while I pursued my "money" career and I've also ventured further - into experimental audio, circuit-bending and photography.

The end of 2003 seems to have marked a turning-point: I find myself in the midst of a spontaneous artistic combustion. I've produced reams of large charcoal and pastel pieces, writing and photography. I can't begin to post a fraction of it.

It is even rumored that I'm dropping-out of tech to pursue a degree in fine art. Keep an eye on this space as this saga of somewhat-less-than-epic proportions unfolds in glorious white, black and teal.

One of my weaknesses is a tendancy to overanalyze - Mix frequently reminded his students that "if you're not producing anything, you're not an artist anyways". The message is simple: Produce! Now!

Amy Robinson
Amy took me seriously as an artist even before I did - she convinced me that I didn't need anyone else's approval or even aknowledgement to call my work "art". In fact, disapproval often serves only to confirm that one is creating.

Don Van Vliet (Captain Beefheart)
Yes, Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet - he paints, too!

Beautiful, wicked, nakedly honest dark insights arranged on canvas like stars that randomly form the exact outline of lovers that were meant to be. You should check his stuff out, at beefheart.com

Brian Eno
What, Eno again?

Yes - my hero, self-obscured genius, rennaissance man and root of so many artistic breakthroughs - his visual artwork, as with everything he touches, is unearthly in it's sohphistication, but so very human in frailty. Order obscured by intense complexity, simple beauty under all the distractions, a single crystal-clear note - all the subtleties of Eno are exemplified in his artwork.

Google him up, and prepare to be expanded.

Vasily Kandinsky
This man's work has fascinated me since I first discovered it in grade school. While in Los Angeles I enjoyed several visits to the collection at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena - you can only appreciate the trueness and energy of his work in person. I'm a big admirer of Composition 8.

If you keep hanging-around here , you're likely to be clobbered by these impending "webaclysms".

2004: Boiling Point
The appetizer of "Phase III" material here is but a whisp of the creative tsunami I find myself in. An onslaught of new paintings, drawings and photos are poised to burst from my lab into cyberspace - and from there directly to your cerebral cortex. You've been warned.

GaryD's Raytraced Disasters
Code geekery rarely overlaps with visual art - except where raytracing is concerned! I've been playing with them for years - what chaos would I wreak with a Povray interpreter? All the gory results shall be laid plain.

Green Journals II
Yep, more on the way from this series - by request, even!