Biography

My journey as an artist has been both long and unconventional. I became interested in art around 6th grade while growing up on the semi-rural north shore of Long Island New York. Throughout high school I took drawing, painting, photography, ceramic and jewelry making classes, but my real passion was computers and programming. By the time I graduated in 1986 I was fluent in six different computer languages, had programmed an Atari 800 to control the heating of a house and had an academic scholarship to attend Carnegie Mellon University to study computer science and electrical engineering.

Much to the disappointment of my parents I declined my scholarship offer as I had other plans for my academic future. During my junior year of high school I began surfing and had set my eyes on the sunny California coast. After getting accepted at the University of California in San Diego (UCSD) which is perched directly above a world class surf break, I set off to both study computer science and spend as much time in the water as possible.

After my sophomore year at UCSD I made a life changing decision. I spent the past two summers at an internship for Grumman Aerospace doing computer systems analyst work and I came to the stark realization I did not want to spend the rest of my life sitting indoors behind a computer screen. Many of the lower division college computer science courses duplicated what I had already learned in my accelerated high school program and because I wasn’t continuing to learn new things I found my passion dwindling. I also found working at a large aerospace corporation, or at least the department I was in, had zero room for working on novel things or creative problem solving. So I made a decision to explore something different when I returned to school in the fall, something that I could be passionate about again - I just didn't know what that was.

During my first two years at UCSD I had continued my interest in art and filled my elective classes with as many art history and studio art classes as I could. While taking an art history class in my sophomore year, I realized that many of the artists I was studying from the post modern movement actually were tenured professors at UCSD, which piqued my interest even more. I was starting to get excited about the prospect of focusing my energy into art, and I decided to change my major to visual studio arts, spending the remainder of my time at UCSD taking classes in painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and film history. The classes I enjoyed most centered around large scale sculptures and architecture.

When I graduated with my BA in visual arts, it became clear achieving financial success doing something art related was unlikely, so I continued what I was doing to support myself in my last year of college - managing a house painting contracting business for a larger outfit. After obtaining my own contractors license I set out on my own at the ripe age of 23, built a team of about a dozen employees who over seven years painted hundreds of homes and many commercial projects. My business was successful, I was financially independent, but I was bored and felt unfulfilled. I loved business, but not the actual business I was in. So I packed it all up and decided to move back east and help my parents retire from New York to a rural property on 30 acres in Western Massachusetts while I figured out my next step. Art was calling me.

During my time in Massachusetts I contemplated going to graduate school to obtain a Master in Fine Arts and visited the Rhode Island School of Design. When I looked at tuition costs and realized the financial and time commitment required to obtain my MFA I decided to take a year and see if this was something worth making such a significant investment in. I was incredibly fortunate to meet Andrew DeVries, a very talented bronze sculptor who was speaking at a local art event for the city of Springfield. I approached Andrew after his talk and asked if he was taking on any interns, and he graciously offered me a position to work with him in his sculpture studio and bronze foundry in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.

I spent a year working with Andrew at his foundry where he taught me everything about the lost wax bronze casting process, while simultaneously working on my own sculptures in my off time. I primarily worked in marble and large scale stone, creating abstract pieces. I learned a lot of valuable lessons during that year.   I saw how incredibly hard Andrew worked.  I have never in my life met anyone so committed to his work. Andrew would work tirelessly in the sculpture studio and foundry, then meet with patrons, and then travel to nearby metro areas to promote his work.  In addition to his incredible work ethic, Andrew was extremely talented.  His work was inspired, emotionally evocative,  aesthetically captivating, and masterfully executed.  Despite all of this, I could see how difficult it was financially to keep it all going.  Andrew had a reasonably comfortable life, but certainly wasn't affluent by any means.  I concluded I was not passionate enough about my art to work as hard as I saw Andrew working for such modest financial reward.

I also found the actual process of sculpting to be incredibly tedious, and if I was honest with myself, it was a bit boring. Painting wasn't much better. I could quickly conceive of a piece in my head, play around with it mentally and then set out to execute it. The tedium of carving stone, or casting metal took weeks and months and by the time I would get halfway there the enthusiasm for the piece would start to fade. I could see the piece so clearly in my head and in the stone, it would just take so long to chisel, carve, sand, and polish to pull it out. I loved the ideation and creation process, but not the actual execution.

During that same time period I also traveled to Boston, New York, Chicago, and Washington DC to visit museums and study different artists.  When I first saw Rodin's "Adam" I had a visceral reaction to the raw emotion and expression of the piece.  Although I find the impressionist painters work beautiful with their play of light, I thought Rodin's work to be more impactful in his impressionistic use of form and scale to demonstrate raw emotion. In stark contrast was another favorite sculptor of mine, Constantine Brancusi. His elegant and slender metal and stone forms were the opposite of Rodin. They were refined, simple, the essence of form - and resonated with me at a more ethereal level.   I was inspired by both of these artists, but for different reasons.   With Rodin I was drawn to the emotional connection I could feel with his work, while Brancussi’s refined style resonated at a more aesthetic level.

There are two other artists who also stand out from that period in my life.  One is Paul Stankard whose work I saw on display at the Chicago Art Institute, and then again in some private collections in Manhattan.  Stankard crafts highly detailed large glass paperweights of miniature flower bouquets, roots, seeds, and bees.   The play of light, magnification of form, translucent colors and incredible detail is mesmerizing.  His work is so visually stunning that I would find found myself magnetically drawn to them, and started to collect paperweights of more affordable artists, so I could have some of what I saw in Stankard’s work in my own home.

On the other side of the glass sculpture spectrum is artist Dale Chihuly who is known for both his beautiful and elegant glass bowls, baskets and vases as well as his large-scale installations of glass sculptures comprised of hundreds of flowing large glass pieces, some multiple stories tall. One Chihuly exhibit which took my breath away was at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Several dozen large-scale pieces were installed within a giant two story gallery with natural light filtering down from a forty foot ceiling and a viewing balcony along the perimeter of the second story.  Between the organic forms, bold colors, and play of light reflecting and passing through the various shapes it was a glorious visual display that had a huge impact on me.  Chihuly's work left me with a burning desire to posses the work itself.   So much so, that later in life, I took glass blowing classes so I could try and recreate his modest pieces since I could not afford the thousands of dollars it would cost to purchase them myself.   My home and office are still scattered with dozen of glass pieces I made at that time.

It was 1998, and I had worked with Andrew for about a year, not quite sure where it was leading. The internet was just coming into mainstream society with the advent of the world wide web, and people were starting to build websites to conduct business and create online destinations for all sorts of subject matters.  On a trip to visit a good friend in California, he suggested I look into learning HTML and Photoshop and try my hand at building a website, as it combined both an eye for design and engineering.   My friend was generous enough to give me a spare computer he wasn't using and suggested I take it home with me, and use it to learn about building websites, which I did.  Two weeks later I suggested to Andrew that I build a website for his sculpture business and he agreed.  I spent about 3 months designing and building Andrew’s website, with pictures of his work, photos of the bronze casting process, and a directory of all his pieces for sale.  Andrew kept that website for nearly 20 years, still using it to showcase his work.

It was at this point in my life I concluded I neither had the inner drive or passion to make sacrifices I knew would be required to be a successful artist. For the second time in my life I decided something that called from deep inside me was not worth pursuing.

What I did learn in the process of building Andrew’s website was that I missed working with code and it re-kindled the passion I had as a young teenager for creative problem solving and engineering.  I also missed California and surfing.   While still living in Massachusetts I spent the next 6 months teaching myself modern web code and started to build my own search engine website (this was before Google.)

I then took a trip back to San Diego to visit my same friend planning to stay for about 10 days. I stayed for nearly 3 months. During my visit I spontaneously decided to apply for computer engineering jobs at a few local startups and had three offers within a week. It set the course for the next 25 years of my life.

Over the next 25 years I worked in various roles in the technology industry from employee, consultant, to CTO. I founded my own startup company with a business partner, which had great commercial success, and had a successful exit a couple years later. I did public speaking as a subject matter expert at annual industry conferences attended by thousands of people. I designed, engineered, and built open source software used by tens of thousands and have published papers that are used in university course curriculums. Over my career in technology I have had the privilege to work with hundreds of companies including tech giants such as Apple, Adobe and SanDisk, as well as growing organizations across a broad spectrum of industries such as healthcare, education and government.

Throughout my career I made a conscious effort to always stay with the code. I took or created positions that always had me doing direct engineering work, exploring advanced technologies, coding concepts, designing architectures. I loved the creative problem solving challenges and didn’t want to let go of that. At its best, I would lose track of time absorbed in these efforts. I found writing code to be like sculpting with abstract thought, and I never wanted to give that up to focus purely on management responsibilities. Looking back I realize I have probably written over a million lines of code. It was the creative artist in me that I didn’t want to let go of. It was both an intensively creative and analytical process, and I enjoyed it immensely.

Towards the later part of my career I found myself working directly with CEO's and their leadership teams to help them to prototype and envision their companies products and formulate both business and technology strategies. But at the end of a particularly intense and rewarding, but ultimately tumultuous engagement I decided I was ready to move on and explore something new. It was time for a change. I felt like I had made my mark and had developed a certain mastery of the subject area - I wanted to learn new things and develop my talents and skills in a different direction .

I love to work hard, and I love to see results. But I need to feel passionate about what I am doing. I knew for this next chapter of my life that I wanted to connect with and inspire others and I wanted to try and use a different set of skills to make a more meaningful and positive impact in my own unique way. When I got really still and listened I could hear that whisper calling again ... art. As I spent more time focused inward I realized that it might be time to rethink the decision I made 25 years earlier to walk away from pursuing a professional career as an artist.

My heart was drawn to the play of light inspired by Chihuly and Stankard, the elegance of Brancusi, the raw emotional of Rodin, and the delicate complexity and play of bold color's of Georgia O'Keefe. I started looking at ways to use technology to help me cross the tedium gap I found in prior attempts to executing sculpture. I wanted to create three dimensional forms without having to spend weeks and months executing them. I started to teach myself 3D cinematic and sculpting software. I researched 3D printers, different composite materials, glass fusion enameling, resin casting and myriads of other mediums and techniques. Searching for something that would allow me to execute the visions in my head while not bogging me down with manual processes.

At one point during this exploration phase I grabbed my phone put it in macro mode and took some close up pictures of a gladiolus in the garden as a study for doing intricate 3d computer models of flowers. And BAM... one photo jumped out. It looked like an O'Keeffe painting. I took more pictures and started to accelerate my learning of 3d sculpting software. My idea was to use 3d cinematic software to design close up forms of flowers and other botany and then create large scale hyper realistic prints showing intricate detailed organic forms with plays of color and light.

During this time of artistic research I had to have surgery for my ankle from an injury earlier that year and a long history chronic sports injuries. While the surgery only took two hours, the recovery was projected to be quite a bit longer. Four weeks with no weight on my foot, another month with a walking boot and no driving, and six to twelve months for full recovery before I could surf again. I vowed to make this time as productive as I could.

On a Sunday morning while recuperating in bed, four days after my surgery, I was continuing to teach myself the 3d sculpting software and thought to myself - this is taking a long time, I wonder what other technology could help accelerate this. I knew of some new artificial intelligence technologies being used to generate artistic images and ten minutes later I was generating images of hyper realistic close ups of the flower petals, stamens and pistils with one of the emerging generative AI platforms available. One hour later I was creating self proclaimed masterpieces. It felt like being struck by lightning. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I would conceive of something in my head and a few minutes later I would see it manifested right before my eyes, as if by magic. The play of light, the incredible detail, the artistic form, it was unbelievable. It was if I could channel all of the artists and styles of art that inspired me into new and incredible forms by simply thinking it.

It felt unreal, and it felt like I was cheating.  I started looking at other people generating similar images, and while they looked similar they were not the same.  They didn't have the same type of details, color, form, and shape.  In its current state, AI generated art is done with word prompts. An artist uses a combination of words that represent the type of images they are trying to create, and can then modify those results with more descriptive and nuanced terms.  I continued to iterate and combine previous results with more nuanced and detailed prompts and I would marvel how the software would complete the computationally intensive math to generate new images in just a matter of minutes.  The tedium gap had been crossed! I was no longer sculpting now. I was doing something entirely new: creating visual forms directly from thought, following my artistic intuition and guiding the artificial intelligence down various paths. The proposed term for this new type of generative art has been coined “synthography.”

I spent the next few days contemplating the very nature of art, and what it means to be an artist. I want to create art that captures the viewer's attention with hyper realistic detail, colorful organic forms, the play of light, scale, and a compelling aesthetic - to ground the viewers attention in the present moment and help them appreciate the wonder that surrounds us all on a daily basis. While art is a very subjective endeavor and impacts everyone in different ways, I hope in some small way I can help to foster a sense of gratitude and appreciation for what it means to be alive and feel connected to the world around us.

Much like the invention of photography dramatically and controversially ushered in a whole new era of art with modernism and the impressionism movement, artificial intelligence will not only change what it means to be an artist, but also the forms and mediums we are able to express ourselves in as well as the pace at which we can create. This is just the beginning.

Tom Gonzalez