Gary Rohrabaugh

Gary B Rohrabaugh (born February 12, 1955 in San Diego) is an American painter who is one of the next generation Optical Art or Elemental Art painters.
Early life
Gary Rohrabaugh was born in California and grew up in central Alaska. He studied art at the University of Alaska (1973-1976), and later with CAD based designers, and local artists. His early works included geometric themes. Around 2004 he began to develop his signature Elemental Art style consisting of black and white minimalistic geometric illusion invoking patterns.
During his early career, Rohrabaugh worked as an computer program designer from 1982-1999 at SoftSource earning many awards for his graphics design programs like Drawing Librarian and Vdraft. Then he invented a new method to display web pages at SoftView and received multiple patents confirming his invention. He also worked with far more talented programmers producing fractal and stereogram generating software embedded in commercial applications.
Career

Rohrabaugh's style, originally developed during the 1970s, and resurged in the new millennium. Gary was influenced by a number of artists like M.C. Escher, Victor Vasarely, and Josef Albers.

It was during this resurgence in the last decade that Rohrabaugh began to paint the black and white works for which he is known and calls 'Elemental Art'. They present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of third dimensional depth and movement. In the early 21st century, his works were said to induce sensations from humor to vertigo. Works in this style comprised his first solo show in Alaska in 1974 at the University gallery, as well as numerous Internet based shows.
Internet career

In 1994, Rohrabaugh presented a new format to view vector based images on the Internet at the NCSA Second World Wide WEB Conference in Chicago.
Rohrabaugh began investigating black and white based images in 2004, the year in which he produced his first elliptical arcs painting 'Cone'. After a trip to France in the early 2000s, where he was inspired by tile patterns and art work in the modern galleries in Paris. Rohrabaugh began to explore playful active designs. Typical of these designs is Interesting.
Gary Rohrabaugh is not currently represented by a commercial art gallery.
The tasks and duties of an artist
Rohrabaugh made the following statement about the basis of Elemental art, in his 'Thoughts on ‘Elemental Art’':
:'Drawings and paintings are all optical illusions. Successfully converting what we see to flat static images requires the use of illusionary tools. Perspective, scale, and vanishing points are employed in varying degrees of success to depict our active three dimensional world.'
:'Elemental Art attempts to reduce the illusionary tools to their most basic optical illusion or an element. When successful this gives the viewer the pure effect of the optical illusion. Using only line, simple forms, and white space this art form provides a viewer experience of visual depth, three dimensional surfaces, and motion where there is none.'
:'Elemental Art is the study of the basic building blocks used by artists to represent our three dimensional, motion filled world on two dimensional static surfaces. Defining then rendering elements is the focus of this body of work.'
:'Black and white Elemental Art pushes simplicity to the extreme, stripping away even color to reveal the underling optical illusion.'
(NB. Rohrabaugh is using 'Elemental Art' to mean not only optical art, but any phenomena subject to interpretation, such as experiences or perceptions)
From: 'Elemental ART', Portfolio or Elemental Art Paintings, published by Gary Rohrabaugh, Bellingham, Washington, 21 July 2010, quoted in Fine Art America, by Rohrabaugh, fineartamerica.com
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