| I transitioned from filmmaking to software engineering (long story) and now paint very seriously in my free time. I think of myself as an artist with a day job. When I come home, I crave the release of my easel. My partner has noticed that when I'm engaged with my art, I'm more relaxed and just "more of a person." My background in art and storytelling, and particularly in film editing, informs my day job in so many weird ways. Although I feel like an outsider and a total weirdo sometimes in the tech world, I have an intuition and attention to people that many of my colleagues don't have or don't have as keenly. I can tell the story of a project in a really compelling way. I can fit the pieces of a project together in the same way that I can fit the individual shots of a scene together. On the flip side, computer science has helped me approach my art in a more disciplined manner. It's also opened up a world of digital art to me in a way that would have been unapproachable before I really knew stuff about computers. I firmly believe that deep study in one concentrated area absolutely informs other areas. Mine happen to be art and computer science, but this could be language and chemistry or philosophy and physics or any number of combinations. I think there's something to the Socratic notion of true forms, and I think immersion in any particular discipline gives you different directions of insight to these forms. Or to God, if you want to give a theological twist to it. Science and (good) art are both getting at the same thing: truth. They are two different sides of the human experience, pointing at the same thing. I would dare to say that one cannot be a well-rounded person without at least some appreciation or mild interest in the other. T.S. Elliot was a banker when he started publishing poetry. His wealthy society friends offered to pay him the same salary to write full time, and he turned them down. There have been many other writers and artists who found the discipline, financial security, and routine of their day job necessary to foster their artistic output. I do dream about being able to paint full time, but I wonder if I would be as productive in my art without the daily exercise of, for lack of a better term, my left brain. |