bio

I have always been an artist. The medium has changed, but the drive to create beauty has remained constant.

In my youth I carved scale model dream cars and won Fisher Body national competition for a college scholarship. After graduation from The Art Center College of Design I began my pursuit of beauty as an automotive designer. The tools were vellum, chalk, airbrush, and clay.
For a glimpse back to that time follow the link to some of my work at the Walter P Chrysler Museum Chrysler Art Gallery
http://www.chryslerheritage.com/pg210.php
There I developed an appreciation for the perfect curve and fluid form.

I earned a masters degree in design from Wayne State and designed numerous concept vehicles. I am their principal patent holder with Daimler Chrysler.

Designing both the exterior and interior of Voyager 3, Wagoneer 2000, and Expresso, a Discover Magazine Innovations awards finalist, gave me an appreciation for the precise control over 3D space that engineering computers facilitated.

As a pioneer in Design Office computer application I worked with 3D hardware and software providers, Evans and Sutherland CDRS, Dassault Systems CATIA, and AliasWavefront StudioTools, helping them create tools with an artistic orientation. Virtual reality came of age in that time frame, with a cost only a large corporation or the government could afford.

I painted with oils and watercolor, photographed nature, but was captivated by the virtual tool.

The new millennium came. The timing was right. Rhino and BMRT raytraced on a PC platform, a process which years before, required a mainframe. I retired from my position as Manager of Advanced Product Design Strategy 2 DaimlerChrysler Design Office, built my second 3D workstation with 2 gig of ram, a network with a terabyte of storage and applied for the trademark “VIRTUALISM

“Suddenly I had the tools to recreate and share all I admired. An Enzo, a swan, a cala lily, a world of stunning creations to be studied. The digital world seems restrictive to some, but as with any instrument, the interfacing eventually becomes a reflex and then the beauty flows. I am in awe of my subject matter as I emulate it and want people to be uplifted by my interpretation.

VIRTUALISM
Is
Digital sculpture, painting, and optical physics executed with a vision to create a sublime reality

The objects in these Gicl'ee Prints are real.

They are mathematical models. They were created and exist in digital world that is quantifiable to a fraction of a millimeter. Their surfaces are generated from elegant non-uniform rational b-spline curves. Some surfaces are painted with image files as large as 36 million pixels and textured with complex bump and displacement maps. Specular, diffuse, translucence, and radiosity properties are assigned to them. The images are ray traced in multiple passes, illuminated with complex lighting schemes using multiple sample area lights, spot lights, photon computation and caustics.

All this precision sounds cold but the basis of nature's beauty is in its micro and macro perfection. Natural form and the way the light plays on colors and textures is all science and perfectly rational.

This is the medium of the Millennium, intense and elegant, exercised to the same end as all previous artist tools, the joyful exploration of beauty