The artist is me, G S Bredehoft…
Born and raised in Playa del Rey, coastal Southern California, this was home base for a couple of months short of 18 years… Living two blocks from the beach, under the takeoff pattern of runway 2 4 Right at LAX, with my parents and my two older sisters.
I had sand flea bites as an infant and started surfing before I was 8. Our dad was a pilot for Western Airlines, our mom was a real-life grown-up Kansas farm girl who, as a teenager, got her first non-farm job building B-29 bombers in Wichita during WWII. One of our neighbors across the street had been a fighter pilot with the Flying Tigers. Various neighbors were engineers or machinists for the aerospace industry. Some were artists, musicians, teachers, or in the entertainment business. Notedly, one neighbor rode his bicycle to work—non-ironically—at the oil refinery in El Segundo.
The streets of our youth are still there, sitting on and surrounded by the sand dunes with the native plants and critters whose homes were those dunes long before we were there. But our houses are long gone—taken by the airport. Remaining in me is the deeply seated appreciation for family, farm life, open space and the natural world, flying, art and engineering, riding bikes, along with love for special neighborhoods filled with wonderful neighbors. All fostered during those early days on Trask Avenue.
Home base: Leucadia, CA 1989-Current.
Education: BFA Ceramic Sculpture San Francisco Art Institute 1976.
Since receiving my BFA, I’ve created only one ceramic piece. When working with ceramics I started using an air brush to apply glaze, and eventually automobile paint, to my sculptures. While I loved the tactile connection of working clay into three-dimensional objects, shortly after graduating from SFAI, I became confident that painting was a more viable path for me than ceramic sculpting.
With my first computer in 1984, I saw the possibilities of the tools-for-artists that could be developed for personal computers. Within a few years I had taken a detour away from creating art on a daily basis and was working in Silicon Valley as a technical support engineer for one of the first major third party Macintosh developers. After repairing a hard drive, and recovering what turned out to be rather valuable files from the bit bucket, the Adobe Products Visionary, as a friendly thank-you, gave me a beta copy, then a release copy of the first version of Illustrator. Soon Photoshop, along with a multitude of mostly-now-dead products including a mix of early Macintosh 3D and video software, were made available to me from a variety of sources.
After working with two other Mac startups, one in San Francisco and the other in San Diego, I was done being a tech industry employee. In 1993 I started working for BCM, a small company in Chula Vista that designed, and caused to be manufactured, hats, wallets, and belts for No Fear. BCM closed suddenly in the early 2000s. Since that day, I have been: surfing; consulting on a variety of software projects; working, traveling, helping escort my mom through the last years of her life, taking care of our native plant garden, and playing tennis with my wife Tanya; all that in addition to being a productive artist trying to make positive contributions to society.
Thanks and cheers,
gsb