Hi! I'm Daniel G. MacDougall, and my artistic pseudonym is Dacob Paine...
I never knew that I might have artistic talent, despite the fact that my mother is an excellent sketch artist. My previous adventures in art and drawing were limited to stick figures and some simplistic abstracts, mostly intersecting lines that overlapped in interesting patterns.
I'd found Second Life (aka SL, an immersive and interactive virtual world) around that time, but I'd never really taken to SL like some did. I found SL to be an interesting place but I initially spent most of my time buying and collecting other people's art and renting land to make small galleries to display the interesting pieces I'd acquired. I found employment of sorts in SL as a custom “scripter”, working with the very limited command set available in Linden Lab's “Linden Scripting Language” or LSL, a scripting language in the style of “C”, a very common computer language used the world over and a language with which I was already familiar as I was an amateur computer programmer.
After a while, I discovered that I could make some very interesting semi-symmetric art works with a program called “Context Free”, which uses the power of recursive logic in the form of instruction sets, again written in the style of “C”. The amazing beauty of the pictures I could create with that program let me to an interest in creating my own works, as I have always had a love of the abstract arts. As I started to recover from my nearly life-threatening depression, I made a solemn vow to the Universe, or “God” as some people like to describe the totality of creation.
I vowed to make art that was intrinsically beautiful, with the hopes that if even one person were to see a piece I'd created, and to find in my art a small reflection of the amazing beauty of every day of life, then my work would not be in vain. And so I started to work simply to help others see that every single day of life on this planet, no matter how challenging or difficult, is always filled with the amazing beauty of nature.
My original works are utterly unique and are created with a technique that I did not learn from any other artists, nor through any educational process at all. I started working with the GIMP, a free image manipulation program that is just as powerful as Adobe's Photoshop. I choose a “swirly” style as that is what pleased me, and I started working with multiple layers of transparencies, blending colors created in my own custom color gradients that I'd created specifically, sometimes using ten or more layers in each painting. Not every piece I make is quite as “good” as some, in my personal opinion, but all are infused with my desire to show my audience that beauty is all around us, at all times, even if we are so obsessed with our own problems that we loose all ability to see it. My style evolved dynamically, with some pieces being fully abstract and some integrating representational aspects – certain pieces have human and animal-like figures, while some represent ideas or concepts that are expressed only in the alignment and contrasts of the individual component elements.
As I stated previously, if even one person sees one of my works and recognizes the inherent beauty of every single moment of life in the human form, I have succeeded in my work a million-fold. This is all I desire for my life, and my art is the legacy I shall leave behind after I have passed on from this incarnation.