From his childhood, Kevin was a hands-on kid, always driven by a vivid imagination, science, and mathematics, with a healthy dose of problem solving, creativity, persistence, and excellence.  He didn’t play much with his toys, because he took them apart and built other things.  He loved brain teasers and hands-on puzzles (e.g. Rubik’s Cube).  Where others might resign or compromise, Kevin would lead, innovate, and articulate.  To this day, he is not afraid to leverage what works while pushing the edge into some new territory, and for that, was often called a visionary by his peers and colleagues.

 

Kevin graduated high school in 1977 as a member of the National Honor Society and then led something of a high profile career in the computer software engineering industry, achieving Fellow Emeritus in 2003 of a Fortune 16 pharmaceutical supply and medical informatics company.  He was often asked where he went to school, and he would usually answer: “There is only one school: the school of hard knocks”, referring to the human condition of trial and improvement.

 

Until 1990, Kevin’s artistic prowess was confined to stick figures and smiley faces.  However, in his high school curriculum, he enjoyed several years of mechanical drawing and even considered that and architecture as possible career tracks; there, he learned about attention to detail, perspective, precision, drafting tools, pencils, and drawing pens.  In addition, Kevin was quite an avid “shutter bug” in High School, and won 1st and 2nd place photography awards at the local and state fairs.  In this context, he learned about lighting, color balance, contrast, subject composition, and capturing a mood in two dimensions, and in black and white.  His favorite photography subjects:  glamour models, horses, and off-road motorcycles.  The glamour models consisted mainly of other female students, but that did not detour the young Kevin from experimenting with creative lighting and props to produce images well beyond the rest of his classmates.  Okay, so he missed the point.

 

It would be another decade and much study of psychology before Kevin really began forming his personal conviction about beauty, its value, and its purpose; he would come to understand that beauty is much more than a look.  For the past fifteen years, he diligently studied such glamour make-up artists as Kevyn Aucoin, such figurative artists as Patrick Nagel, Dennis Mukai, Pater Sato, Hajime Sorayama, and Olivia De Berardinis, acquired a significant library on art technique and photography, and worked hard in his spare time at perfecting his craft and process.