My interest in making artwork began as a young teenager, almost completely blind in both eyes.
I LIVE IN THE VISUAL ARTS. I am a Creative Specialist; a Creative Director; an Art Director. I take thousands of Photographs; I create Patterns for surfaces and technology; I have large abstract Paintings in corporate and private collections in eight countries; I’ve designed and made Ceramics and Textiles.
I’m fascinated right now with Systems of Identity, the concept of turning a logo idea from a static symbol to a mark that metastasizes into patterns of identity, a molecular, cellular life.
We are drowning in logos we cannot identify. It is time for the next level.
I help companies with graphic design and creative direction. Every company has blurred edges. This is my territory. The best companies in the world all come to embrace design. If they didn’t do it yesterday, they will do it today or tomorrow.
At seven years old, with less than seven percent vision in both eyes, I could see little more than light and dark, shades of soft color. My eye problems pushed me to the periphery socially and academically. I sat under the chalkboard in class and could not read. During recess I was bullied and ostracized. I hated school.
I went to Switzerland for the first corneal transplant. At my age, my eye was not mature enough for surgery. I had to kill six months. Bored, lonely, and restless.
Wandering the hotel, I found a dim unused silent room with soaring ceilings, tall windows covered by deep gold velvet drapes. My first “studio”.
I brought in large thin sheets of drawing paper, and thick stubs of charcoal. Kneeling on the carpet I bent over, nose to paper and began to draw. All day, every day. There was no thought about being an artist. I was not following any passion. There was zero evidence of talent. I had stumbled across an activity that gave me instant feedback.
The compulsion to draw was to get immediate feedback.
Through desire the child discovers his solitude, and through solitude his desire. He depends upon a reliable but ultimately elusive object that can appease but never finally satisfy him.
And so I kept drawing. The process created the obsession. It’s not the other way round as is often believed. Other hobbies became immaterial, obsolete. I dropped everything else. This continues in a more evolved fashion, to this day.
Three days after the surgery, bandages came off, I found myself staring at the floor in astonishment. A highly polished surface with a cork-like texture. I could see texture!
The first thing one loses when vision fails is the ability to see texture. When a camera lens snaps into focus, texture and edges sharpen. I’d lived for years in a world without edges. This beginning turned out to have a lifelong influence on my work. The blurring of edges invaded my philosophy, borne out by science, and became the prime theme in my photography.
A year later, at age fifteen, the second transplant to my right eye took place in New York. I fell in love with the city. I finished high school, and entered the University of Art and Architecture. I majored in Product Design and Graphic Design graduating four years later with a First Class Associates Degree.
I went on to attend Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, spending three years immersed in graphic design, illustration, and fine art. The day after graduation I packed my books, clothes and art supplies into a van and drove to New York City.
I didn’t know a single person in New York. I pushed my portfolios in front of every art director I could meet, and freelance life began. I was filled with the thrill of the city, I made artwork until midnight then went dancing in the small downtown clubs until dawn.
Punk Rock was arriving in a fury from the UK. A door had been flung open, a young paradigm shift that raged energy. It infected music, design, fashion, the arts, magazines, hair- styles, it had attitude, it was pared down, it was fast, and I was airborne by its power. From a visual and musical viewpoint, it slapped a slumbering youth culture awake. It was a weapon!
I worked for large corporations, WNBC-TV New York, Revlon, Estee Lauder, Bergdorf Goodman, New York Institute of Technology, New York Times Publishing, New York Magazine, Esquire, among many others. And my work with smaller adventures—start ups— were sparks that begged a bonfire.
After ten years of this, I turned to fine art, for a decade long immersion in large-scale abstract painting. My paintings now hang in public and private collections in eight countries.
I began to feel pulled back to working in the commercial marketplace, away from the gallery. I needed to work with people.
I began working on a Mac during the mid-nineties. I worked widely in graphic design, illustration, mixed media, photography. After working as an art director for a multimedia company, charged with all design and branding, I changed direction to designing large patterns for architectural surfaces. My life zigs and zags like everyone else’s. The more the categories break apart the more they have at their center the same spine inside all good design. It is intimate. It is capable of being wordless. And behind it is a story.