The Company
BIYO LTD has been incorporated since 1990 and is based in southern New Hampshire. The company name of BIYO was originated from the artist's nickname 'yO', and since the artwork is by yO the name was created as such; BIYO. We currently offer extensive graphic art prints of sporting events as well as our past original, limited edition, silkscreen artwork as depicted within the BiyoArt site. Please e-mail questions and comments to yo@biyoart.com. Thank you for the visit and we hope you enjoy the experience of our site.

The Kid
Like most artists, I grew up on a farm in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, studied electronics at a vocational / technical high school and won a few advertising awards at the local newspaper. Played golf, read comic books and represented Massachusetts in a national 4H-poster contest. Swam in New England AAU events, achieved state recognition through a citizenship short-course in Washington, D.C. and installed car stereos. Performed public speaking on various topics, won awards for cooking and helped shovel manure out of the barn. Showed the animals at state fairs, went fishing a lot with my brothers and rode a motorcycle. Watched a lot of cartoons, rolled a van and hosted a fashion show. Drank beer, went to concerts and graduated with honors from high school. Typical stuff for a young artist…

Boston and Life
Then came college. At one point I had an application for MIT, and it had pages in different colors, but it also only had one line for "…your favorite cartoon character and why." So I went for a cooperative education at Northeastern University in Boston. MIT and Harvard were on the other side of the river Charles.

My cooperative education consisted of working for a lot of smaller companies while my classmates, the ones with the grades, worked at the 'big companies' (debugging RS-232 cables, as one noted). So the only work smaller companies had was, as it turned out, a lot of everything. This in turn gave me the experience and insight regarding unwanted career paths.

Beyond that, college was a five-year blur. Lived near Fenway Park and the Boston Red Sox; enough said. Favorite courses were creative writing, numerous philosophy classes and watching people from the outdoor bar down at Quincy Market. Graduation ceremonies were at the Boston Garden and to my surprise there was a diploma waiting for me in the binder. No where near honors this round, just a BS in Electrical Engineering and a sigh of relief from my parents and grandparents.

After working at the corner market for six months I 'got a real job' at a local defense contractor. Moved up the engineering ladder at a pretty fast clip while volunteering to work one segmented year of the first five years at a remote site in the Alaskan Aleutian Islands. Over the next nine years my career path took me through supervisor of manufacturing and into the management zone. A wonderful place of fuzzy math, silly putty schedules and political wet noodles. Boredom was a never ending battle, for it had become too easy to play with the game that everyone else was aligned too; something was missing.

In the end one must recognize, and in turn be prepared for, a life altering 'opportunity' when voluntarily presented; severance pay. After fourteen years as an engineering type it was time for a change. The Biyo business, to this point, had been incorporated for ten years, and as the saying goes, "You can never finish a race by only running on Sundays", had become a painful, straight jacket reminder. So, staring out the window and wondering about my artwork had finally got the better of me; it was time to put the other side of the brain to work.

The History Of It All
Speaking of artwork, the history of which as it applies, I seem to remember taking an art course in junior high school and before that, way back in kindergarten, there was nothing but art things. But beyond that there has been no formal art learning other than that of the experience of creating and doing stuff on my own. My brothers and I attribute our creativeness to growing up on the farm with sticks, rocks and dirt as the bulk of our toys during our prime kid years. Although our mother would remind us it was hereditary…to this day we still don't know what she means.

It all started way back when with pastels, pencils, charcoal, pen and inks. Whatever floated the boat at the time, constantly changing to what appeared both interesting and challenging. Slowly over the years the most prominent type of my artwork settled into what I called Shadow Art. One would simply take a specific type of picture and artistically color in and out its highlights to form a black and white image. Then, a splash of color was added to a specific area to highlight and bring to life the whole image. The original was then squared, transferred by hand and inked onto larger media. One of a kind pictures, of which the entire family has in one framed form or another.

At one point the local Arcadian Shop was interested in selling duplicated images of a skier that one of my brothers had shown the owner. But, even as a teenager, the cost of reproducing the original by hand several times did not make sense on the profit side of things. Plus, that would be rather boring…there had to be a better, more unique and fun way of doing volume.

Well, ten to fifteen years and one house later (late '80s), add some engineering and computer experience to the mix and one uncovers the multiple graphic applications of an Amiga computer and business incorporation. The Shadow Art images could now be completed by hand (or mouse if you will), on screen, from digitized video pictures. The business and tax aspect of things had now became more clear...

Well, more clear in that no longer opaque; just foggy. For in the process of running the final versions of the Shadow Art through various filters, the current Digital Art versions were also created (as appears within the BiyoArt site). To me this was cool, unique, weird art stuff and right up my alley of incoherence. Large format paper and vellum pen plots were produced to show around and validate this new art direction. Although quite a few people didn't understand it, most thought it cool, unique, weird art stuff. So more and more and more were produced.

But the unique volume aspect of the process was still illusive, until that past Arcadian Shop brother of mine brought a vellum plot to a local printer. In the end came the advice of not only selling them for not less than one to two hundred dollars apiece, as is, but also the illusive volume answer and product example of silkscreen. Excellent.

Well, five years and another house later ('90s) the silkscreen process ended up being 'just' another challenge to conquer, along with its fifteen to twenty thousand dollar price tag. It takes less time to print a series of fifteen to thirty prints than it does to clean the screens of the ink. The trial and error process was not only time consuming, but also not a very pretty site to observe over the years. Buy a book to get learnt you say, I have about twenty. One would think that someone would have written about the ABC's of silkscreening my type of fine line artwork (0.35mm lines), for at this point of the learning curve even authoring that would not be a challenge…any more.

The Kid Again
Yes, the silkscreen is a pain in the butt, but when all the printed lines and colors are aligned on the media and the final version lies before you on the print table for judgment…excellent. Well, most of the time anyway.

One would think that after ten years of not being able to work full time on the real passion of life and that giving up a perfectly insane real world job after fourteen years (drive time of 2 to 3 hours a day) would finally allow the creative art juices to flow into that passion…right? Well, the first nine months of freedom from the real world were spent fixing the things around the house that have been put aside for the previous ten years. It's just not comforting being at home and knowing all is not at rest in the surroundings around you. The house karma was just not attuned to be in all day long and it took about a year to straighten out. This at least sounded like a good explanation to really try and get situated full time for the long haul.

Anyway, it just became the summer of 2001 and with two more computers, a laptop, scanner, various printers, plotters and stuff, I am inching closer to finishing the race that is no longer only run on Sundays. Even though the race itself has seemed unending, the building of websites, creating logos, working commissioned art and exploring e-commerce has kept me from getting too bored of the original stuff that I will eventually get back to…because it's all fun in the name of art and it's not exactly normal BiyoArt.

Over the Years
It just became the summer of 2009. The first show of the year is behind us and despite the current recession, our show sales were more than double that of the previous year. Our business has followed as our market has dictated and we no longer bring our silkscreen prints to the shows, although they are still available to purchase through our online e-commerce site. Two years ago technology caught up to replicating the perfect resolution of the straight silkscreen lines on the prints. We have now focused on providing graphic art prints of sporting events as unique gifts of art for kids, teens and adults who are the players, fans and coaches of the sport as depicted for the keywords on search engines. . . doing that, as well as AdWords, AdSense and PCI Compliance. . . blah, blah, blah.

We had also found that our options were limited with the silkscreen prints as the public requested impossible variations and were unwilling to pay the price. Plus, the public basically couldn't tell the difference and were willing to pay a much lower price for the actual designs, with all of the possible color variations, as compared to a single silkscreen version.

It has become a very funny thing; the more designs we have, the more we sell and as the saying goes " If it's in stock . . . we have it ", and if not I can print it and ship it tomorrow. Now I just need to find the time to do the designs . . .

It's been real
We'll have to do it again real soon.
Talk at ya.