Bio

It was a warm April day when Christopher Michael Clark was born in a small Kentucky town in the foothills of the Appalachians. There, he spent his early childhood climbing trees, messing about in the back country, masterminding lego creations, and discovering the joys of drawing. After moving to the Panhandle of Texas and when in his early teens, he split his time between learning the ins and outs of computers and the Internet, drawing and creating digital art, and racing dirt bikes.

Later, during high school, his family moved to Austin, TX, where he began to study photography using a Canon A-1 film camera. In a quest to attain the highest of quality images, Chris acquired a Hasselblad 501CM medium-format camera and began to study Ansel Adam’s Zone System, a technique for achieving optimal film exposure. Continuing his interest in photography, Chris learned flash-lighting and studio techniques while assisting a commercial photographer and working as a photographer at a high-volume event and sports photography and production company. Shortly after high school, a backpacking journey through Europe brought incredible experiences and further opened his photographic eyes to the world.

Desiring to satisfy his curiosities of the physical world and preserve the purity of his photography, Chris began studying Mechanical Engineering full-time at The University of Texas at Austin (UT). Having a systematic, visual learning style, he quickly excelled at mathematics and engineering coursework. Classes such as Dynamics, Mechanics of Solids, and various Material Science courses were very alluring and helped provide a foundation for the understanding of the tangibleness of the surrounding world.

While at UT, he participated in several volunteer activities, including an electronics recycling campaign and a restoration trip to New Orleans. There, he helped refurbish a damaged elementary school and tutor students in trigonometry. For Chris’s Senior Design Project at UT, he worked within a team to compete against other Texas engineering schools in an effort to develop a solution to heavy coil springs in large oil and gas valving mechanisms. Chris’s team investigated many solutions before recommending a compressed nitrogen design, which won the heart of the project sponsor and earned the Mechanical Engineering department a cool $10,000.

Currently, Chris is based in San Antonio, TX, where he spends his time as a mechanical design engineer creating the structures within VIP aircraft, thinking about form and function, playing tennis and running, watching sci-fi films, baking bread and roasting coffee, continuing his interests in drawing and photography, and enjoying life with friends and family.