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June 2000
Anthony Noa |
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I was born in a small Alabama town associated with a large university, Auburn University. It was not a town known for
its production of artists, but more about sports - football. Regardless, my interest was in the arts since I was five. I have oil paintings I did from that time and, until I was 15 years old, I
only thought about drawing, painting and sculpting. I have never been to a formal (or even informal) art school, but instead worked and studied under working artists. Most prominently, William W.S.
Wilson (affectionately known as Watlow), a very well known portrait artist and scenic designer. When I was 15 years of age I was introduced the world of classical ballet and over the next two years
I struggled with the decision to paint or dance for a living. The scenic designer and portrait artist, William W.S. Wilson, my painting master, was commissioned to design and paint the sets for a local
ballet company's production of Swan Lake and invited me to help. I met a very famous dancer, Frederic Franklin, while I was working on the sets and he spoke to me about a part I could do in the ballet
— albeit a very small one. Mr. Wilson agreed to let me do it, provided I kept up my assignments with him, and I did my very first ballet. After that stint I knew I wanted to dance for a living.
Since then I have danced with major companies both in the US and Europe. I did not let my visual artistic talents go, but continued to paint and sculpt as often as I could. I had a few shows and
sold work, and did a number of portrait commissions. Not long after I began training for ballet my brother bought one of the first personal computers on the market — a Kaypro 2 — a DOS type of screen
without the ability to display any type of graphics. It was interesting, but I remembered a conversation I had with him mentioning, "it would be great if you could draw on the screen".
I use to do a great number of color studies for each of my paintings, and I thought it would save a lot of time if I could do it on the computer and change colors automatically to find the right
choices. And, lo and behold, it happened — though, quite a few years later. |
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After I retired from being a professional ballet dancer (at the ripe old age of 37), I continued to pursue a career in dance as an
instructor (my first love) and choreographer. Attempting to begin a ballet training program in Dallas, Texas, I met a man who worked for Micrografx as a project manager for their Hallmark Card Studio
product. He loved dance, took class from me and eventually became our group's fundraiser and board developer. One of his great ideas was to develop a library of clip art for dancers and market it
on the Internet. This began the very popular dance website, DanceArt.com, which now boast over 35,000 visitors a month. Since I was going to be the chief clip art artist for the site I needed a software that could do the job
well, and he introduced to me Xara. This was in 1996. I fell in love with Xara... magnificent program with features not found (at that time) in other vector art programs. It was the first
program I experienced that when an error occurred not only did it allow me to save my work before it shut down, but apologized for it as well. What more could you ask?I not only became one of the
major artists for the site, but was one of DanceArt.com's featured writers on classical ballet with my own section called, BalletCentral. I was also introduced to a very little know vector animation
program called, FutureSplash. I used the program to create dance combinations for dancers to learn new steps. I would do all my drawings in Xara and then export them into FutureSplash. Eventually
FutureSplash was bought by Macromedia and it is now known as Flash (I have kept up with every new version) and along with Xara, is one of my two most favorite computer programs. I have designed websites,
both still in existence and some defunct, brochures, greeting cards, interactive CD ROM's, all in my capacity as a featured writer for DanceArt.com and my position as Artistic Director of NPB, a professional
classical ballet training program. I do all of my layouts, graphics and designs in Xara. Sometimes I tweak the final outputs in Painter 5, Picture Publisher, or Adobe Photoshop. You may view some of
my websites done with Xara at: www.npb.org/ and www.danceart.com/balletcentral/
My dance bio is at: www.danceart.com/balletcentral/ noabio.htm . If you have any questions you can email me at
noa@uswest.net. |
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