Troy Viss

B.A., University of California, San Diego

Teaching Experience:

1990-1993, Digital Media Faculty, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena

In the early 70's, I painted with my parents in our recreation room overlooking Martha Lake near Seattle. We painted barns and lighthouses and sailing ships with highlights and shadows that looked very real. We encouraged and complimented each other, and we admired our progress together. We were a family of artists and this is where I first learned to love the process and the products that produce art.

In the 80's, I married Kristen and we moved to San Diego. I learned how to work with hardwoods and sharp tools, building furniture and custom kitchens for clients along the coast in La Jolla and north to Del Mar. I completed my undergraduate degree at UC San Diego's Revelle College with studies in Engineering, Urban Planning, Cognitive Science, Communications, and Visual Arts. In that order.

In the 90's, I began a career path that has included varying degrees of practice, consulting, and management in the sometimes converging disciplines of graphic design, information design, user experience design, design education, editorial illustration, feature film animation, educational assessment, and classical parenting. I learned about using technology, designing with typography, and applying theories of composition and color. I grew to appreciate the importance of visual and information hierarchy, the craft of storytelling, and the necessity for schedules, budgets, and deadlines. Throughout the course of this decade I filled approximately several million pages in moleskin notebooks with pencil sketches, ink drawings, product concepts, and ideas for children's books that I still intend to write.

In early 2000, I started painting brushy sketches with black ink on the pages of an antique 2-volume Webster's dictionary. This simple exercise in line quality and graphic expression has evolved into a collection of thematic studies that I often revisit and continue to practice. In 2003 I started painting with oil and varnish on canvas—learning to predict and control the behavior of the medium through practice, and with a generous portion of mentoring, motivation, and patient instruction from my sister Kelly who is brilliant and uniquely, amazingly talented.

Today I paint with an accompanying sense of dialog, building underlying surface and texture with vocabulary and mixed media that becomes obscured or distressed, often beyond recognition—and because I know it's there, it creates an influence that is similar to the effect of painting on dictionary pages, where the context of words and images inspires the content and placement of ink on paper. At the heart of this, my intent is to create art that people will want to live with, visit often, and rediscover at varying degrees of distance and resolution, eliciting memory and association with personal experience, through conversation that is honest and encouraging.