David Graybill
David knew he would be an artist from age 12. Drawing, sculpture and photography were his main interests. In college, he began making and marketing stained glass panels, terrariums and jewelry boxes and was rather successful. He was a ‘rich hippie’ and had a new VW van!
But stained glass fell from favor so, not wanting to walk away from art altogether, he became a stainless steel welder/fabricator and, in a few short years, found himself constructing state-of-the-art industrial machinery, employing advanced manufacturing materials with the latest electronic controls, some machines as big as a house and costing millions of dollars. He loved the work but wanted to be more than a ‘tech’ and went back to school to study electronics and computer science.
With a manufacturing and electronics/programming/motion control background he eventually found himself designing and building automated manufacturing equipment all over California, for industry and the government. As controllers and networking became more prominent, he gravitated to data networking and spent the next 20 years managing networks before retiring and leaving the corporate world to fend for itself. He opened a studio (CNC machine shop really) in 2015 and has begun producing sculptures inspired by his years in manufacturing and admiration for the techs and engineers he worked with. They saw themselves as ‘technical artists’ and drove themselves to create the finest, most reliable, most technically perfect pieces… pieces of art… that just happen to do something useful.
He wants his sculptures to capture the engineer’s desire to go beyond ‘form follows function’ and honor the grace and confidence woven into their designs that gives a machine a human soul.
