Roy Nuzzo
Artist Bio
Roy Nuzzo was born in 1944 to jazz musicians in an Italian close-knit family. His mother went blind but didn’t lose even one beat. His grammer school and high school learning was 90% one on one with my [assigned to me] truant officer, lakeside in the mountains with fishing lines and bait he brought ‘to catch Roy’.
Roy attended Rutgers for four years while also attending night school to get more than college allowed and he aced college. Roy attended Cornell Med after Rutgers, then Yale Surgical, then combo Harvard & US Navy [as a trauma surgeon] while doing research at Harvard & MIT Rehabilitation Engineering and Research Center]. Roy wrote the first code that computer captured human motion and generated 3D representations. Many computer awards including a World Competition 1st prize [ for Non Cartesian CAD – tracking complex motion in free space without a fixed or limiting x,y,z. and immune to ‘exceptions’ [code crashes]. After the NAVY [with Admiral of the Atlantic fleet commendation] Roy was put to work by Dr. Warter to ‘do something with’ the Childrens’ Specialized Hospital. He did. He eventually came under the charitable umbrella of the Summit Area Public Foundation’s works supporting my research along with several industrial sources also interested in my approach & research findings [3M, Aircast, J&J, & others].
Artist Statement
Surgeon, rehabilitation engineering.. years as med & science artist/illustrator. Most common thrust was show how something is done in a self-explanatory illustration. For mind cleansing, I began experimental art (by me for me) working totally from mind in techniques that were either old or simply theoretically possible but untried. Example an oil-ish painting from resuspended oils in lead free gasoline painted on Masonite made porous (as non-reflective as it gets). Photos are only used for documenting important details (how many eyelets on a WWI boot, how tall, buckles?).
My only still art is what my imagination or testing allows. Well before computer graphics (early 1970s) I used colored photographer flash cellophane & highly focused light to determine color “What-Ifs” of light through colored glass etc. with a result that today would be a computer ‘ray trace’. All was by freehand (ok, also rulers & garbage can lids for circles).
In parallel with this I was asked to illustrate stories and especially many Celtic literature things as including poetry. I avoid – like the plague – doing any painting method twice or even of the same subject, with exceptions for unresolved visual conflicts to let the outcome choose. I always disliked long names on artwork as distractions and in med illustrations were none or kept small – so ‘RMN’ is my signature – small & in hard to see color choice that hides in the paintings. In the poetry illustration, sometimes all or parts of the text needs to be scrawled prominently as a cry for help from within the painting. That’s kind of odd, I guess. I am not interested in photo reality because I have a camera and cameras win – always. A paint brush = ‘not a camera’ … depict.
