The computer is like a bicycle for the mind.., ( Thanks, Steve !). It was a lot more for me because the computer gave me a life. Without the computer I would have been stuck in a kitchen somewhere, just kidding.
Just saying and telling girls everywhere – learn how to use it and learn how to use your mind because when you learn to use the computer and well you get to be around smart people and will get smarter yourself.
And because I was able to use the computer and well and I was all around smart people I was able to go and make a living in the Silicon Valley and make hundred thousand dollars and travel the world and expand my mind and learn and grow. I had a wonderful time and a total ball although at first glance you would think I was just sitting in front of a computer all the time but no, the computer was the gate to the magic kingdom.
I remember going into one of the lead engineers at Lucas’ office and I saw him sitting behind a Mac and I was like what is this, I didn’t know Macs were any good at 3D, and he’s like oh I bootcamped it, so this friend of mine taught me how to use the mac basically having both OS X and Windows installed on it. Then and there I was hooked and I’ve used a Mac ever since, of course I’ve always had a bootcamped Mac and that saved the day many times.
Being a video game artist became a part of my DNA as a fine artist and as a thinker and as a philosopher because I do have a stance and I do think a lot when it comes to life and video games and computers and how to do things and how to do things well, and I’m really into old Masters but I’m also crazy about all the new technology.
When I was growing up I grew up with the worlds of Isaac Asimov and I was constantly on some sort of a voyage in outer space on ships and fantastical planets but I see that a lot of what was in these absolutely imaginary spaceships is becoming a reality today with the computer and really fast chips being able to process incredible amounts of data and having incredible magic available at our fingertips.
So I was really excited to finally make a push and put this book together because it was a totally worth the adventure and I learned a whole lot.
I did my first computer rendering when 3ds Max was called 3d studio and I think it was version 1.23 or something like that and it was running on DOS. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
So it really has been one miracle after another ever since and although I decided at some point to go into Fine Art full time and just remain in computer graphics as a teacher and freelancer I still really am crazy every time about everything 3D.
Lesson 6 is stay away from garbage. You know it when you see it. Stay near and learn from the best.
Below pictures I took at some point in the vicinity of Vatican museums the Louvre and other odd places.
I’ve always been fascinated with the brown -ness of drawings I had seen in museums around the world so when I first started drawing I used black but black is just too assertive and too dark so I found the most gentle semi-transparent brown ink which is of German origin which is so delicate which serve my purpose and it’s my secret
I find comfort in the old Masters the art of the Renaissance as well as art from two millennia back, it’s my wall against greed, the materialistic the piles of useless garbage and all the empty words it’s like a poetry wall for me against all evil
One of the best things that happened to me in the Silicon Valley was that people really never cared about my gender or my accent, and I highly encourage you if you ever want to try and work, work for somebody that you like and somebody that likes you back. Although the Silicon Valley appears on the surface to really care about middle-aged white men, under the hood what Silicon Valley really cares about is whether you produce great work, and since I was sitting in a cubicle and typing and clicking away nobody really cared if I had a vagina or whether I had come from Eastern Europe or not.
When I first moved to the Silicon Valley I was fresh off the middle of the Midwest University where I had gone to do my Masters and where I had gotten a full scholarship. It is great to have the American government pay for your education so always make sure to get good grades and be well positioned for a full ride. It is much easier than you think – just go for the place that gives you education for free and you will never regret it. Paying for education is a racket and full of regrets and financial woes long term. We moved to the Silicon Valley directly from school basically dragging a U-Haul behind us. In the valley I had no family or friends, and since I was wondering what to do – I worked. Because I had no idea what else to do other than working and I didn’t know anyone, I didn’t have any network, or support network, or friends or family, .. so I started paying attention to what the most talented people were doing, people whom I admired and respected for their work, and tried to do the same thing, and what the most talented people were doing is working a lot so I did too.
I was sitting around in the cubicle in front of a computer and I was having absolutely a great time, I was having a lot of fun, and I was getting paid $100,000 to do the fun. There was a company, a video game company called Activision which paid me about $120,000 – so I will get a yearly salary and then they will have these layoffs whenever a project is over, whenever a project was over they will lay off people and give severance. I would get laid off from a project and get $20,000 severance. In a month or two they will call me back and say hey please come back on board but you have to return the money. I’m like no way I’m not returning the money so I will get on board again and I will keep the $20,000. And then the project will be over again for some reason, it would be over in six months and then they will give me another $20,000 in severance. So it was really nice like that.
I would end up with these fantastic amounts of money in my bank account so what did I do with the money? I went to the Uffizi, I went to the Vatican Museums, St Peters, to the Borghese to see the best of Bernini, the churches and the ruins of Rome, the galleries in Florence, the best Gaudi palaces in Barcelona, the three great museums in Madrid where i spent literally every day soaking the greatest art the world has ever seen – Picasso, Dali, Goya, El Greco, I went to the Louvre, I went to the National Gallery in London, to the National Portrait Gallery. I went to Amsterdam and the Hague to learn of Rembrandt and Vermeer, I was frequently stoping in New York as well, I learned from the best the world has to offer first-hand. It also really helped that as an artist in the Silicon Valley I was getting really acquainted with the best processes in the world, with what the Japanese called kaizen – continuous improvement. There’s one thing about being a commercial artist is that you work together with other people in a collaborative way, you work towards a certain visual goal and that visual goal has a very high standard, and that high standard has to be achieved somehow right? The best possible way is, because you can’t really nail it right off the bat, the best way is to take small steps and do continuous improvement until the final product is satisfactory, ideally, as in the case with the Silicon Valley, the greatest product and the highest standard that can be reached.
When I went to study all the old Masters and I was already familiar with all the processes that the Silicon Valley used to create these marvelous projects and products, I could recognize the same drive for greatness. I could recognize that all the old Masters ( I include in this definition all the Renaissance greats as well as all the great artists from Antiquity ) were not only great artists but great technicians, great engineers as well, they were very very technical in their approach.
Silicon Valley had this really flat management structure where you basically learned how to do things by bouncing off of other great people that were doing their thing. Steve Jobs had the famous rock tumbler metaphor where you put a bunch of rocks in a tumbler and you turn it on and the next day come back to see that all the rocks were polished into nice gems by simply rubbing off of each other for 24 hours.
Although nobody ever spoke of kaizen the spirit of kaizen permeated the Silicon Valley.
Stay away from garbage. You know it when you see it. Stay near and learn from the best. You always know when you see great work, it usually speaks for itself – the people, the products and the processes are usually something you want to repeat in the future, learn from, come back to, deeply respect, greatly admire and want to emulate.
I am writing a book of secrets, and not just about Lucasfilm, but about the sauce that produced the greatest franchise of the 20th century. I mean we are talking about not just a business that made money, not just about a brand, but about a story that made generations of adults dream and get silly behind glowing sticks, and made grown ups line up around the block to see a spaceships movie. We are talking about a saga that made many millions around the world shiver with amazement. How do you make stuff like that, how do you create it, where do you start?
Recently it happened that I had to look up a company that does stuff… and I googled reviews on their product and people literally said it was the ugliest thing they had ever seen. How do you live and go home with something like that?
Okay, so what did George do to make Star War so incredibly compelling, so engrossing as to produce mass hysteria in people and a kind of worship. How did he do it, what was the secret sauce?
And you don’t need to read my book to find out although it may be helpful – one of the ingredients in the secret sauce is people.
When I first got at Lucas I sucked. I hit the ground running and I literally made, for the first months or so, garbage. It was difficult, I had to learn everything from scratch, how it worked, how I worked, how to put together very technical artwork. There was no manager or boss to tell me I sucked. in fact I had the most amazing managers you can possibly imagine. But the most pressure I felt and the reason I strived to get better every day was peer pressure. Every day there were these guys around me and every one of them was literally a genius at what they did. Every single artist was on top of their game and I couldn’t accept the fact that I would be the one to let the team down. So I put in 16-18 hour days to learn and get better. So these people were the A-players.
Every industry has A-players, the A-player company or the A-player team. I encourage everyone starting out to head directly for the A-player place, so they can compete with the A-players. Each industry has exactly one A-player company. It is one, not two, nor several. It is always one. And the other thing was that Lucas had taken Lucasfilm out of Hollywood and established it in San Francisco, and Lucasfilm was not just a creative endeavor, a film company, but was also a technology company. Same with Pixar. They both benefited from being children of the Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley style management and operation. Silicon Valley is important in the way the French Revolution was important, the kind of operation… where a 12 years old Steve Jobs can call up a CEO of a company and have a decent chat. No barriers to entry but your own abilities, and your ability to articulate ideas. But I am gonna talk about this at length later on.
When I decided to leave Lucas I realized there’s one place in the world that is the center of the Universe in art and that is New York. I applied the same principle when I started drawing – I never looked at the contemporary scene in drawing, I always looked at the drawings of the masters – Michelangelo, Leonardo, Durer, Rembrandt, all the old masters drawings I can possibly lay my eyes on. When I wanted to shift my work and enter the surreal space – I started looking at Dali. And the lesson is to always learn from the best, from the A-players, even the dead ones.
One of the greatest effects that working in the Silicon Valley had on me and one of life’s lessons I will never forget, in the greatest possible ironies of all, is that dreams come true. To dream well is very important and making a very good dream come true is very, very profitable. Ironic right? One of the management manuals at Lucasfilm had to Dream at number one position to do when starting a project.
There’s stigma to dreaming, in that somehow to dream is to be detached from reality and not stand on firm ground. Or that it is not very profitable or practical, or very difficult. Of course it is. It is difficult to make a dream come true. You gotta make molecules do things they haven’t done before, you need to convince people to try something they have never seen or done before.
The Valley, as one of the most economically motivated places on Earth, was built on dreams. The crazier the dream – the greater likelihood to change the world. An easy dream is easy to be dreamed up by the numbers. A hard dream has more likelihood to be unique and to get traction. Thus was Silicon Valley made on dreams. You would think that motivator was money – no, in fact a lot of the companies in the Valley that later went on to make global impact on literally millions of people were started in the backyards of modest homes.
Look at what Disney bought for four billion dollars – forty seven thousand characters. Not real estate, not diamonds or gold, nor oil wells. But Fantasy. Good dreams can be very profitable.
Hollywood Hills mansions are built on dreams. The dream factories of Hollywood create very profitable dreams by selling a great product at bargain prices, a movie that costs millions to make is sold to us for 15 bucks a piece. For Ridley Scott, for Spielberg, (no longer) for George – it is a numbers game. What has boggled my mind is the scale of it all. It really is of biblical proportions.
So imagine a Michelangelo – okay, perhaps that won’t work if you have no special place in your heart for George Lucas – imagine hundreds of talented individuals who collectively make up a Michelangelo talent. And they toil day and night for months or years to make a perfect marble statue. And the next day half a billion people on the planet get one, the same exact perfect copy. For a tenner. That’s Hollywood for you and this is how it works.
My old little iPhone is a dream, right? Gandalf the Grey’s Staff of Power is like a stupid twig compared to what the latest generation iPhone can do. In that regard Gandalf is practically a puppet compared to the great wizard Steve Jobs. My Mac Book Pro beats any wizard from Harry Potter at magic, I can put together a figment of my imagination and send it to 3D print across the globe and voila – we have a conjuring.
I was watching a video of several movie directors of high caliber, guys that get handed hundreds of millions of dollars to work on dreams. One of them was Ridley Scott. The moderator asked Ridley if he got any surprises during filming. And he said, no, not really, I storyboard everything, it is exactly as I storyboarded it. I shoot the film on paper before we begin.
One thing that becomes clear is that dreams don’t come true in a dreamlike manner. Usually hard work is involved and serial dreaming. Dream up a good dream. A good dream ensures you will be entertained and motivated for a long time.
When you were growing up they told you to stop dreaming and plant you feet on the ground.. when instead they should have told you to dream more and better. It is important to have more than one dream. One day you will outgrow a dream, or an organization – you will need to be ready for the moment to employ another dream. Use your time wisely to dream better, get better at dreaming.
Wanted to talk about very basic things today, values and self-worth. Something I have often thought about and wanted to understand, I noticed that my ability to produce quality work improved with increasing my own sense of self-worth. And one of the things that working at Lucasfilm gave me – it may sound corny – but it gave me a spine. A sense of self-worth built on competence. Many people are born with loads with it, which I admire but I personally wasn’t one of this people and had to find my self-worth like water seeping into the ground – drop by drop.
But before we go into any personal growth nonsense I wanted to share my favorite stories on our inherent worth here. There is one story from Tony Robbins that I like – at one of his seminars, and I heavily paraphrase here, he told a man he is going to give him fifty million dollars if he loses fifty pounds by tomorrow morning. Everybody got quiet and Tony kept asking, well, is it possible to loose fifty pounds by tomorrow morning?? Of course, it is possible!.. Cut off a hand, cut off a leg and you have the fifty million dollars!
Would you cut your leg or hand for fifty million dollars? How much is it worth?
Let’s talk about price points. Again I am going to paraphrase here I think from Dale Carnegie, let’s figure out how much your leg and your right hand are worth. How about your left hand? Fifty million, one hundred million, two hundred million, how about a billion dollars? Would a billion dollars be enough to lose a hand? How much exactly would it take for each of your hands, legs, ears, eyes. What is the price on your head? Say for your sense of hearing, or eyesight? This is scary territory but the reality is that you are sitting on the kind of wealth that not all the Croesuses and Rockefellers combined ever owned.
So build yourself a capital, self-worth independent of outside sources – talents, skills, competencies. Build on top of the pile of gold you re already sitting on. Build yourself the kind of capital that can’t be easily taken away from you. I really like to compare my own experience in this to a DIY project. DIY projects are a nice metaphor because these are the kind of projects we usually like doing, a labor of love when no one really forces us to do and which happen in the cracks while we are doing something else. I liken the process to building a shed.
I came from middle class background with solid habits but nothing to my name – no connections, no money, no support network, and only two hands and a head on my shoulders. I started out with only one thing to my name – I knew that I liked what I did, for the most part. It’s like building a shed – you need to build a shed and would like (the idea of) building a shed. Starting out you don’t know how to do it well, and if within an organization – it’s not even your shed ( but this could change later ). So you go on internet forums, surf the web, gather information of the best practices to build a shed. You find out the best sheds out there, you talk to the people who built nice sheds and gradually figure out how to go about it. You start building it, you make mistakes, you do some bartering with people who own nice tools ( that you don’t ).. but eventually, since you are into sheds – you build a decent one. One day your neighbor sees your shed and goes “hey, nice shed, can you build me one?”. This is how it went. I never put buzzwords like “face time”, “schmoozing”, “networking” or “making myself look good” into my shed building adventure. Approach your work in the world as if it is a DIY project – make sure you like the idea of doing it, find out the best practices, get together with people who already got their sheds going, figure out what you have got available, get what you don’t have and go about it.
These are just lessons I learned and observations I made while on the ground in the Silicon Valley. And these got me results at the time. There is a time and a place for everything. There are mistakes, and everyone’s story and circumstances are different. At the end, I personally found out that working in the Silicon Valley got me only so far. And this “so-far” place is building self-worth. Self-worth and a sense of being a capable human being is worth a million dollars.
It is the same, only longer lasting, feeling as if I had built a nice shed in my yard. A sense of accomplishment especially growing up without anyone to build it for me. Which is not required.
Things have changed since my Lucasfilm days but one thing I am as sure of as ever – invest in self-worth, no matter which way you choose – self-worth and self-respect won’t be taken from you and never go down in value. And self-worth does not necessarily equate self-confidence as they sell it in the lifestyle magazines – when your car brakes down you don’t need a confident mechanic – you need a competent one.
“Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), a towering genius in the history of Western art, will be the subject of this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition. During his long life, Michelangelo was celebrated for the excellence of his disegno, the power of drawing and invention that provided the foundation for all the arts. For his mastery of drawing, design, sculpture, painting, and architecture, he was called Il Divino (“the divine one”) by his contemporaries. His powerful imagery and dazzling technical virtuosity transported viewers and imbued all of his works with a staggering force that continues to enthrall us today.”
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I remember spending hours and days with his work in Rome and Florence. With his sculptures, with his paintings and frescoes, with the St Peters Church, also at the Vatican museums and remember losing my footing at the Sistine Chapel.
I also like – to some degree – his slaves. Not a big fan of the condition of being imprisoned in any shape or form. But we are all slaves until we find what truly saves us.
Michelangelo also embodied the very modern idea of using and innovating technology to further art. Michelangelo was a very technical artist – I remember a conversation at a conference once — where we argued about art and the impression that artists are these soft creatures who flail their limbs about hoping to make the correct gesture into artwork.
Michelangelo’s work is so much more impressive because it required substantial engineering skills to be completed. Even his marble carving of David is one that required engineering thought to free the statue from the odd shaped block of marble. I also have this very odd affinity to marble, I am not saying I like it because I feel very physically drawn to it, almost like a magnet. And whenever I look at great marble I feel glued to it with invisible strings which are very hard to abandon.
The artist also epitomized what I call the Continuous Commitment To Excellence principle. In modern terms Continuous Commitment To Excellence is what Lucasfilm and Apple employ.
Because ultimately it is single individuals that are capable of creating long lasting value and when looking for values to adhere to – I ask – does it hold up after 200 years and why. If there are sculptures that are 500 or 2000 years old and have people still moved and enthralled then there is a long lasting value in them. Usually it is beauty, ideas, skills and mastery of execution. There were recently works at the Morgan museum that were from 3300-2250 B.C and beautifully crafted. I bet whoever made them never thought there’s going to be a creature 5000 years later admiring their work.
With Michelangelo it is that every single work has so much power and mastery to make a lasting impression 500 years later. What underlies this kind of achievement and strength in a work of art? He made sure to become the craftsmen, problem solver and engineer of his works. You can’t be an artist before you are craftsmen. You will need to put in the 10 000 hours in some sort of craft, whatever you can tolerate doing for 10 000 hours. These hours will allow you to become an automatic creator and a good judge of beauty. There are a lot of problems that arise in art and mastering a process will teach you the good practices of problem solving which will allow you to go further than the ones who never mastered a process.
In a world where we are constantly submerged in a Hot Fuzz of markets, teslas, rockets, leadership seminars, virtual realities of all kinds, blade runner futures, menacing robots – all that really matters is the genius of man.
If you get a chance – make sure to see one of his works in person. You will be standing in front of a work of art that outlived many great things on account of being a product of a man determined to be excellent. Michelangelo fought so many battles for the most mundane things like the quality of his marble, the envy of his contemporaries, the papal politics. There were years when he couldn’t be productive and faced many setbacks. The only constant was that with every project he undertook he committed to creating beauty and long lasting value by adhering to his own high standards.
A once in a lifetime exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of art in New York. It is the Met’s gift for us for the Holidays.
There is no greater power in the world than that of being a creator. When you are a creator you are in control. Everything else is an agenda fed by someone else.
We are constantly told by media, papers, whatever visual and auditory space available, that we should be eating, drinking, remodeling kitchens, buying and saving money, I think that one last thing has in such a great way deformed our consciousness that there this anxiety that we have to be constantly on the intake. We walk around with this anxiety for the next intake, I am astonished by the amount of time and energy spent in this city on discussing, cataloging and planning past and future meals, and the acquisition of objects.
Yet, there in the dim light of the Met were these really faint ( by modern standards ) marks on paper that produced in me such great pleasure to observe and contemplate them, and I bet in others too, judging by the crowds. Really, nothing of substance at first glance, certainly nothing to be chewed on. Just marks going here and there, up and down and in circles. these markings, however faint, produced great emotions and appreciation. Pretty wondrous effect given that the author has not been around for the last 500 years and hardly ever comes up in conversations and on television.
The greatest power in the world is the power to create, we have hardly control over the first 20 years of our lives, we are placed and educated somewhat unwillingly and the only thing we can truly will is something of our own, something no one has ever produced before us and no one ever will after.
Michelangelo at the Met – Photographs I took of the great master’s works:
