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But still, I wanted to paint. I had to get my hands dirty. My wife and I rented a small studio space near The Bon Marché. I did illustration for

Le Monde, Maison de Marie-Claire, 100 Idées, the International Herald Tribune and too many ad agencies to mention. I contacted galleries both in Paris and abroad, where my work was included in several group shows. After school hours, we opened our studio for children to paint, draw and sculpt. We called it “L’Atelier de Gribouille.” The French children didn’t have much extra curricular activity in public school, so this was magical for the neighborhood kids and their parents. Some of the children made it all worthwhile.

I attended a new media presentation, and met an American in Paris making wild images for television and the entertainment industry. David Niles had a studio filled with the latest equipment, and when I visited, I discovered the potential of image manipulation. I became his assistant and art director, and we worked for all of the major French TV networks, created numerous commercials and music videos, and we covered the 1983 Tour de France for CBS Sports.

Our main tool was the FGS-4000 from Bosch that was one of the first production-ready 3D computer graphic systems. David and I were sent to Salt Lake City for a week of training on this machine and, as soon as we returned to Paris, we inundated the airwaves with flying logos.

In retrospect, the FGS-4000 was a very cumbersome tool, and even though we marveled at its possibilities, the results were crude by today’s standards. We were exhausted, but we were pioneers. I am grateful to David who allowed me to be part of his mad experiments.

With David, I created work for the television networks TF1, Antenne 2, Canal Plus and many others. We wanted to use our technology to fly the camera through the stripes of the TF1 logo. To visualize this animation, I built a model of the logo in plexiglas. We were  educating ourselves and our clients in what was to come:  3D computer graphics.

To add to the excitement, in 1982, David got one of the first High Definition video set-ups from Sony (1124 lines), and again, I participated in the birth of a technology. It would take twenty years for that one to become mainstream.

After a few more years of freelance art direction, illustration and some painting, I was tempted to move on. A few gallery connections in New York and San Francisco convinced me that I had to return to the States. To California.

So we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Myself, my wife, our two children and a cat settled in Half Moon Bay.

I joined other Art Center alums at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco to teach Advertising Design classes. There, I was able to impart the importance of concept to rooms full of hopeful art directors and I enjoyed it.

An ad on the bulletin board at school caught my eye. Pacific Data Images was looking for an intern to test software they were developing.  I spent a couple of months in front of a computer monitor, playing with software I did not know. There was no pressure to perform. When I got stuck, a few enthusiastic engineers huddled over me, excited about the path I had taken to get so stuck. Some of these enthusiasts are still at PDI/Dreamworks, at Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic. This internship was the beginning of a long ride making movies.

I loved becoming a part of this emerging field in the best place on earth for special effects in cinema. After my internship at PDI,  I took my portfolio to Industrial, Light & Magic who hired me, a fine art painter, to train on their proprietary software. They told me it was easier to train an artist to work with technology than it would be to train an engineer to be a painter. Those were the days!

I have been at ILM for fifteen years, and I have worked on over thirty major features.

I painted a knight in the mouth of a talking dragon, a bunch of green Martians, a warty Jabba the Hutt, a hungry Spinosaurus, a cute Dobby, some hideous pirates, hairy wolves, naked vampires, a white scorpion, a beautiful snake, a smiling flower, two ice planet beasts, and an orange wind-up fish.

A surrealist shopping list.

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