I spent my working years in the world of advertising and media. I owned or was a senior executive at ad agencies, media service companies, TV and Radio production houses, and marketing research companies. I also did both domestic and international media/marketing consulting. I retired from this pursuit in 1997 to become an artist, a goal that I always aspired to. As I never had any classes or teachers, I had to teach myself how to draw and paint. I was determined to become proficient at this task and produce work that was not derivative and was beautiful to look at. I started to learn the craft by doing realistic pen and ink drawings. That was followed by a period of drawing mandalas. I thought it would be interesting to have each drawing contain two interconnected mandalas; one that could be seen in daylight and the other that could only be seen in the dark. I spent five years on this project which honed my ability to draw and learn about material. As this proved to be a very niche endeavor, I decided to expand and draw abstract art. This evolved into adding high tech inks and acrylics to my work. This work, I call it “Playing With Light” also took several years to develop. My goal was to produce work that interacted with the viewer while also being beautiful. I believe my current work meets these objectives. This series of paintings changes as the viewer changes the angle of viewing. They also change as the light it reflects changes. Some are phosphorescent and become visible when the lights go out. This unfortunately is hard to capture in photographs (my web site: www.halkatzstudio.com uses animation to show the changes). When viewed in person, however, they seem to be something many admire. - Hal Katz