About
I’m Steven Lareau. I was born and raised in Southern California, and lived there until graduating High School in 1975. Once I was out of school, I packed up and headed to the Chicago area, where I met my future wife. We moved to the Knoxville area to get away from the brutal midwest winters, as arthritis and cold weather are a bad combination. We’re now living in Clinton Tennessee, and after living in suburbia my entire life, this suits us just fine.
I got into digital art by accident, quite literally. I had a life changing accident at 35 years of age, leaving me disabled and living with chronic pain. I found I was unable to sleep for more than a few hours a day, so I had a lot of free time to kill. I inherited a computer, and I soon figured out how to work with digital graphics. I found that as I worked on my art, I could get lost for hours at a time, which was a great distraction.
A friend gave me a program that could generate Fractals, and that lit my creative fire. I soon immersed myself in fractals, eventually branching out into all things graphics related. I’ve done everything from digital image compositing and manipulations, 3D images and animation, and lately I’ve come full circle- I’m back to working with Fractals.
I use software that many others use, but I like to do things the software was never intended to do. I use a 3D program called Bryce for a lot of my abstract art, even though it was designed to render realistic looking landscapes. Landscapes bored me pretty quickly, so I started experimenting with other ways of using the software, and I was soon creating abstract images. I love creating things that are far removed from what the software was designed to do, that’s the challenge for me.
I’ve spent the last year gearing up to make prints of some of my artwork, and it’s involved a lot more time than I expected. I had to build a computer powerful enough to process the huge amount of data needed to make these Fractals. Creating images for print making takes about a week to render. I’m working with very large files, but once they’re done, I can make fine art Giclée prints 78 inches by 52 inches wide. Since there are many homes and businesses with ceilings that are higher than they used to be, I can make a print at a larger scale. I have Giclée prints on both fine art watercolor paper and canvas.
If you’re unfamiliar with them, fractals are patterns found in nature, and you’ll see the resemblance of flowers, lightning, solar flares, and more in my work. These images are, in essense, organic in form. I’m able to manipulate them to some extent, changing the viewing angle as well as the coloration in each fractal. Seeing them on a computer monitor is one thing, but seeing them in full, glorious color is even better.
My main body of work can be found here at Hilltop Design. My artwork is displayed in galleries, which contain thousands of images for visitors to view. Going through my galleries, you’ll see the wide range of my work. I’m never content to find a formula and stay with it, I’m constantly pushing myself to experiment with different ways of manipulating images.
If you haven’t seen the prints I’ve made available for purchase, head over to my new site, built as a place to find fine art prints of my work.
Steven Lareau
