Biography
I began drawing as a very young kid up in the Detroit area, scribbling anywhere I could find blank spaces, often getting a swat as a reward. Of course, most of my canvases were walls and table tops, but the urge to create was really there. I wasn't really aware of it then, but looking back, I must have had a dream. I mean, how many swats should it take to stop someone without one? Yes, I kept right on scribbling.
One day my mother saw something and gasped, "Hey, look! It almost looks like Uncle Russel!" I smiled, then looked at my work, trying to see what she saw. I finally noticed a large loop and realized I had captured his nose, the very part I'm sure my mother had spotted. I was ecstatic, overwhelmed with joy, feeling very accomplished, while other kids were getting praised for properly using the toilet.
That boost was enough to start me on my way, advancing from giant chalks and huge crayons to smaller, more streamlined kinds. I would always do my scribbling, then rush to my mother for that badly needed praise. "Wow!" she would say, smiling at me with great pride, "That's wonderful, son. Wait until your father sees this one."
I still recall those times my dad would come home and she would show him my work, and how he would lean down and cock his head, smiling. "Is that a .......... rocket ship?" Oh yeah, a rocket ship with obvious leaves on top and a bird's nest, with baby birds all squawking for their dinner, very visible at the top. Yeah, right! He wasn't the one who would give me that creative urge at all. In fact, pleasing him, I began to realize, would require pictures more like the kinds hanging on the walls, which I knew were created by gods with magical powers far beyond anything mortal kids could accomplish. It was far better going to my mother with my work, or even my gandmother----the English one, because she was all into praise, seeing the minute details of my work. My Italian grandmother was always blunt, saying, "What is that? Looks like scribbling to me." Neither she nor my dad were good for the ego that way, but I suppose it was hard for them not to be realists at all times.
I grew older and moved along into the fourth grade, where I began a comic strip for the class. It was loaded with characters like Mr Egg, Mr Hotdog, Mr Onion, etc., with stick arms and legs, and they did some crazy things. The kids would laugh, but couldn't pay much, so I knew I had to find those who could. I was still getting the same stuff from my dad. My mother would read them, laugh and say, "You are so talented." My dad would look at them and say, "What does this one mean here? Why does he look like that in this frame?" Something had to be done.......fast.
I eventually broke into pen and ink, getting into shading and more detail, and it was beginning to look as though I would make it. My mother was still excited by my work, but finally my father said, "Hey, that looks real," and that was it. I began branching out.
Oils and acrylics were great, because now I could work on textures and shading in a totally new way. I had no lessons, but would just try to make things I could draw appear more and more realistic. I did have that affinity for drawing from memory, never looking at a picture or object unless it was absolutely necessary. People and animals came to me wihtout using models. That had become my style of painting, doing landscapes from a room or characters in a novel I was writing, all without looking at a tree or model. No doubt there were mistakes, but to the average onlooker, the stuff was great. I sold paintings, too. I had finally made it.
However, as I had grown older and more serious about art, the home computer came along. I was fascinated by the colorful squares that they called pixels at the time, dreaming of future possiblities. I bought an old Apple II Plus and had a ball with it. But it wasn't until I heard about the Amiga, after I had moved to Florida, when I really realized computers were going to move into a dream world. I saw that bouncing ball, with red and white checks, appearing 3 dimensional and detailed, which was something no consumer had seen before. I had to have it, so I saved and scraped until I could finally get my first real computer.
Now, computer art has come a long, long way. The resolutions are beyond the dreams of those early days, and the numbers of colors available boggles the mind. Hollywood uses them now, creating Jurassic Park, Star Wars and other special effects movies, and the realism that can be created is a dream come true for me. This power is becoming affordable for those of us outside of the film industry, making even more dreams come true. I would say that the better the software gets, the more creative we users will become.
I can't wait to see what comes next, hoping with all my heart that huge conglomerates don't buy up the small, hungry creators of wonder and slowly regress development to appease the masses. I'm not so sure, but I tend to believe the larger the company, the more the need for mass appeal, where money dominates the excitement in discovering a new way to make realistic water or fog or sweat on a furrowed brow. Most are not artists, which makes being an artist important. Then, to appeal to most for the sake of fast money is to dedicate resources to an abundance of mediocrity.
------WM "MikeArizma" Bagley