2010

I have been a creative person ever since I was old enough to hold a pencil at the age of 4. I started drawing on every scrap of paper I could find to the point where my mother couldn’t keep typewriter paper in the house without my finding and stealing it. I never stopped drawing throughout school, and in 1995 I was accepted to the Graphic Design program at the Nova Scotia Community College in my hometown of Truro where I had formal training in all the basics of design: composition, aesthetics, form, function, typography and pre-press, all of which revolved around learning the best graphic software available, Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator. Upon graduation with honors, I was accepted into Interactive Technology also at the Nova Scotia Community College in 1997, where I learned to use my design skills to create websites, CDRoms, video production, 2D and 3D animation and programming. Immediately after graduation in 1998 I was hired into the booming web industry. This was my first experience not only dealing with a team, but also working directly with clients on a project-to project basis. During my 11-year career I worked for a number of professional companies performing both web and Giclée (pronounced "zhee-clay") is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray". It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne, a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.