a self portrait

This story really begins in Minnesota twenty-some years ago, when I was attending a small private liberal arts college, studying math and the sciences and wondering where it was leading. On a lark, I took a sculpture class in order to fulfill a liberal arts distribution requirement. I wouldn’t say there was a parting of the clouds or any thunderbolt display, but I did have a quiet epiphany over the course of this semester. I found I could immerse myself in this work where hours, even days, could pass without being noticed. I found myself seeking this immersion more and more frequently.

I recently heard the phrase “cognitive dissonance,” which describes the discord between the perception of oneself and the reality of one’s situation. Well, cognitive dissonance was sounding a devils fourth at this point in my life, and I needed time to think. My eyes had been opened to a entirely new venue but I was unable to fully process the information. So I left school and treaded water for awhile.

Enter Mark NeuCollins - production furniture builder. Noise, sweat, and dangerous machinery. Lacquer thinner fumes and the spontaneous combustion of oily rags. Ear protectors feeling like a c-clamp on my head after a few hours. Endless splinters and bruised knuckles. A Chicago Pneumatic air drill precisely balanced in my hand, feeling not so much like a tool, but like a cold metal appendage. Chisels sharpened to an edge fine enough to shave with. Saw cuts made within the width of one of the marks on measuring tape. Dovetails and rabbets and finger joints. Sanding, smoothing, honing, polishing.

After about a year of this, I found work in a small custom furniture shop that specialized in fireplace mantelpieces. I worked with Riah, the owner, out of his garage, heated by cut-off scraps of wood. Riah had an exquisite sense of design, and people would come serious distances to have him design and build mantelpieces. His work had proportion, balance and a quality of workmanship that was tangible. He was an artisan and the wood grain his canvas. From him, I took the lesson that the quality of your work defined your being. Not to get too philosophical here, but later in life I realized that if there is a god, it’s that thing in us that pushes us strive to be ever better. There is no monetary reward for trying to do better than the best you can do. Yet it is, perhaps, what defines us as human.

During this time, the sparse beauty of the furniture of the Scandinavian Modern design movement caught my imagination. I discovered, that one of the founding fathers of the Scandinavian Modern movement taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. I had been looking at art school catalogs in the years since I had left school, and the RISD catalog had always been one of my favorites. When I saw that Tage Frid taught there, I was hooked. I had to go.

I am, at the core, a Midwesterner. And nothing in the Midwest could have prepared me for my RISD experience. While at RISD, I learned that there was really nothing between New York and California, except for a remote landing strip somewhere in Illinois. The professors seemed to all be direct descendents of the Marquis de Sade. The core teaching method of the school was based around the critique, whereupon you would place your heartfelt, recently created ,object d’art in front of a classroom full of your peers. The professor would then proceed to ridicule it piece by agonizing piece. The remains of your sense of self-worth would then be thrown to the wolf pack of students hovering around in a blood-lust craze. The carnage was almost always total. And yet, from the destruction something new would almost always form.

When I had initially decided to go to RISD, it was with a narrowly defined focus - to study furniture design under Tage Frid. Most things don’t work out as planned. A door opens, a traffic light changes, the universe sighs, and you find yourself heading in a totally different direction. When I got to RISD, I found a wide world of form and color and material open to me. Design itself is the process of expanding and exploring possibilities. Wood seemed like such a narrow focus in a school that was inexorably wrapping my soul around a wrought-iron mantra of expand and explore. So, I left RISD with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree (carrying it like a banner held high back to the Midwest. “Hey,...I went to RISD and I survived! I’m a damn Artist, can’t you see!” The cows were not impressed.)

After months of scrambling, I found a position at the University of Iowa Department of Medical Graphics. The medical graphics department’s purpose was to supply graphical services to the University of Iowa physicians. In addition to medical illustration and mechanical production (typesetting for posters, photostats, etc.) Med Graphics had a Genigraphics computer used to create 35mm color slides. Compared to the capabilities of a $2000 personal computer today, this quarter-of-a million dollar behemoth was rudimentary. A refrigerator-sized graphics processor allowed you to use up to 64 colors and 3 fonts at one time. Nevertheless, in it’s time, it was a state-of-the-art computer graphics systems, and I, as a computer graphic designer, was on the cutting edge of computer graphic design.

Eventually, and after a few detours, I started my own graphic design business in 1993 - neue grafik design works. After 7 years or so, neue grafik design works remains a viable business entity. The better part of my time is spent working for a single client, the National Spine Netork, for whom I do a lot of different kinds of work -- only a portion of which is graphics. While I’m still undecided whether there is such a thing as a deeper meaning in life, I’m sure that if there is any conduit to deeper meaning for me then it exists in the pursuit of art. So that's what I do.