|
|
|||||||
|
Bio Language My first (and enduring) love was language. Language, and languages. I studied linguistics at the University of Chicago (PhD, 1977), taught for a few years, and in the early 1980’s discovered the world of computational linguistics and machine translation. I took to it like fish to water, and worked in computational linguistics for over two decades, most recently as a Researcher in Microsoft’s Natural Language Processing group. The structural elegance of language, and the elegant structure of programming languages, have stayed with me and inform my current work. Art I took baby steps towards what was to become a career in the arts in the mid-1990’s, when I signed up for my first printmaking class with Eva Isaksen at Seattle’s Pratt Fine Arts Center. In 1999 I helped found Seattle Print Arts, a non-profit organization whose mission is to promote print arts and serve as a resource for print artists; I still serve on the organization's board. In 2006 I enrolled in the drawing program at Seattle’s Gage Academy of Art, where I (re)learned how to draw and how to think about art. The Academy teaches classical methods and techniques, but its mission is broader: to help artists “meet the challenges of creating contemporary art with insight, skill and sound technique.” These are the principles that I try to keep in mind as I work on my drawings. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Margaret Davidson, my primary drawing instructor at Gage; her work and her commitment to the medium continue to be a guiding light. Seattle artists Margie Livingston and Patrick Holderfield, who also taught at Gage, were instrumental in helping me understand abstraction, and helping me think about what I am trying to say with my work. The tremendously expressive work of artists like Agnes Martin, Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) (bio), Vija Celmins (bio), and Brice Marden (bio) has been central to my development. So many ways, ultimately, to think about beauty. From language and software to art? I've often wondered how I got from language to art, with software design sandwiched in between. Maybe it's that they all involve an intense internal dialog, a lot of quiet, personal time spent visualizing and understanding rules, structure, and function. And finally coming up with something which knows about rules and structure, but it's really not about them. A sentence in another language, an insight about language structure, an elegant piece of software, a drawing: work superimposed on structure, where form and meaning meet.
Joseph Pentheroudakis |