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I was born and spent the first 40 years of my life in Los Angeles. I graduated from Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles with a major in advertising design. So it should come as no surprise that I spent the next 15 years as an art director working in advertising in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Although my job was creating print ads and TV commercials, my real desire was to become a graphic designer. Which I did when in 1986 my wife Mary E. Carter and I started The Black Point Group in San Francisco. We did this for over a decade during which we amassed a wall full of design awards and a portfolio of work of which we were both extremely proud.

In the mid-nineties, Mary returned to her first love, painting, and the Black Point Group was down to one person. This was a time of transition for me primarily focussing on the use of the computer to do design and illustration. And not long after, I got into website design doing my own HTML scripting. In addition I had two books on graphic design published and wrote a several hundred magazine and website articles on computer design, website, and logo design.

Mary and I moved to New Mexico in 2000. While my plan was to kick back and enjoy New Mexico, things have not worked out quite as planned. I’m busier than I ever was, but at the same time, everything I do, I enjoy doing. I work at home with a large group of clients from around the block and around the world. I am Webmaster for a few dozen websites, the Sandoval Signpost website being one of these, and so I get to assemble my own show.

I bought an Olympus digital camera a few years back and have been capturing New Mexico sunsets, photos of Sandia mountain, Cabezon, and everything else that I see. Some of these images have found their way onto websites. And some take on a whole new life when I manipulate the colors and contrast. And some of these are featured here.

I always wanted to do something artistic, but even though I spent four years in art school, I never could draw worth a hoot. So I have combined my photography with vector images, created in a mostly unheard of British vector drawing application, Xara X. I do very little of my work in Photoshop preferring to work in the vector world. My images tend to have lots of wormy things and eyeballs, a product of my arrested development which has left me rooted in my high school past.

I hope you find the images interesting. If you have comments or questions, I’d love to hear from you.

Gary W. Priester
gary@gwpriester,com

www.PlacitasArtists.com/g_priester/
www.gwpriester.com