How I quit painting and became a computer geek

For those of you who knew me as a painter (up until about 1999), you may be confused to hear that I quit painting completely and I'm now working as a software engineer.

So here's the deal: My junior year in college at Cooper Union (an art school), after having already spent close to 7 years painting seriously, I went online for the first time- did some email, played around on the web. I decided in order to prevent myself from becoming a total Luddite, I should learn some stuff about using computers to make art. So I started with photoshop, a little illustrator and flash. After a semester, it occurred to me that this might lead to a reasonably comfortable day job to help support my painting habit.

So I took some classes in graphic design my senior year, and promptly got myself a job to support myself when I started grad school. The first thing I did was built a website for Samsonite, which went well. I started working with a variety of engineers and graphic designers at a consulting firm which built websites for practically every major casino in Vegas. This, of course, wouldn't have been my first choice, but beggars (or painters) can't be choosers.

Meanwhile, I began to play with 3D animation and enjoyed it quite a bit. I started using a language called MEL (Maya Embedded Language), which was really my first programming language (not counting HTML, which is really a markup language, but that's neither here nor there). I began to slowly realize that I was more interested in this and my job than what I was doing officially in grad school (which was still painting).

Painting became less and less pleasurable. The kind of paintings I wanted to make became increasingly difficult to execute… to the point that I started dreading going to the studio. One day, while working on a painting, I sat down for a little break and decided I was done. Then I decided that I was really done. No, REALLY done. No more painting. I reached the end of the road, I had painted everything I wanted to paint.

I took a year off of grad school and focused on my job and making a short animated “film”. In both areas, I increasingly toyed with programming, finding that once you got used to it, it was quite interesting, fun, and powerful. I had become a project manager by that time, and I stopped hiring programmers to do simple tasks and instead did them myself. This went on for a couple more years while I finished grad school, having used my animated short as a thesis project.

Then I moved to Boston to be with my girlfriend (now wife), Kate. I took a job at a company called CardScan with the intention of doing what I had before, project management, a mix of design, usability, web development and a splattering of programming. They had a different idea, and I soon found myself part of an engineering team, doing full-on, soup-to-nuts web development.

So 8 years, half a dozen programming languages, and a couple jobs later, I find that I can code circles around lots of kids that come out of top-notch engineering schools. Though my real “expertise” in engineering is UI (user-interface, which is really kinda art related), a significant amount of my day-to-day work is real software engineering. I find that it actually satisfies the same parts of my brain that painting used to (problem solving, critical thinking, extracting beauty from chaos).

In retrospect: While making art was something I was good at, I didn't ever really like the way that some people like it. I never found it cathartic, or liberating, fulfilling, or any of the other things my artist friends claimed it was to them. When I was a kid, drawing was simply a way for me to visualize the things I wanted to have and/or build (often robots and spaceships). Engineering allows me to build things I'm interested in- so drawing no longer serves a purpose as an end unto itself.

Art, however, is not unlike a chronic disease (i.e. malaria) in that it forever colors your perspective, and you can't ever get rid of it. I spent so long learning how to manipulate, pervert, glorify, and distort perceptions, that now- for me, bullshit glows in the dark. This is surprisingly useful as an engineer.