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Vancouver Art Gallery Vancouver Film School To Whom It May Concern: I am writing to support Denzil Bee's scholarship application for the Vancouver Film School's Multimedia program. I have known Denzil for approximately three years and have had the opportunity to watch his interest in multimedia develop over time. Although I could write at length about Denzil's strength of character, strong work habits, and uncanny ability to quickly absorb and synthesize often highly technical information, I would simply prefer to outline a few key differences between his skills and abilities and those of many other multimedia workers I have encountered through my day-to-day work at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Most importantly, Denzil comes to multimedia not through a computing background, but through a fine arts background. He is an accomplished artist in his own right, who works equally effectively in pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor. Influenced -- at least to my eye -- by the work of classic children's illustrators and nineteenth century fantasy artists like Arthur Rackham and Mervyn Peake, he brings a broad awareness of art and illustration history to his own art work, unlike many younger multimedia artists, whose familiarity with art is almost totally derived from comic books and contemporary design. Over the last year or two, Denzil has begun to scan his line art and then manipulate it with programs like Adobe Photoshop, creating works which are highly effective composites of art-historical and contemporary techniques. This new work is all the more remarkable in that his Photoshop skills are entirely self-taught; that is, he has no formal background in multimedia, but has simply taught himself the program through reading and formal experimentation. As a result, his technically remarkable work has a strongly individual stamp that instantly sets it apart from that of his contemporaries. A second, equally important aspect of Denzil's character is his reluctance to rely on others in order to learn multimedia skills. For example, when he became interested in web design, he did not sign up for a night school course or formal lessons, but simply borrowed books on web design and taught himself to code HTML in approximately eight weeks. Since then, he has continued to improve his design skills, and is now proficient enough that he has been able to produce professional quality web pages for clients like the Granville Book Company and local author Dennis Bolen. Denzil's ability to absorb and synthesize information on short notice is an immensely important character attribute: it signals her willingness to work, and to transform the formal solutions he finds in his reading and study into a highly personal idiom, instead of simply repeating solutions that are by now stylized cliches. In short, I believe Denzil's strong work ethic, highly individual design sense, and wide-ranging familiarity with multimedia design can only be enhanced through participation in the Vancouver Film School's multimedia program. His presence would be an asset to your program, and I hope that you will be able to award him a scholarship and be able to experience the quality and integrity of her design work first-hand. Please feel free to contact me directly if you require any further information or supporting statements from me. I can be reached directly at the Vancouver Art Gallery or at home. I look forward to hearing from you. Christopher Brayshaw |