Mark Richard Beaulieu

Contents

1. Life and work

1.1 Artist

1.2 Software Career

1.3 Photographer

1.4 Novelist

2. References

3. Books

4. External links

Life and work

Mark Richard Beaulieu was born in Camp Gordon, Georgia , son of an Army Signal Corps officer, and grew up in the US and Germany. After studying drawing and painting at UT Austin , he developed a Photorealist style making large-scale airbrush paintings while at Trinity University. There he minored in computer science learning APL and made computer generated film. He studied with and worked for pop artist Wayne Thiebaud while getting his MFA at UC Davis. After a career as a senior software engineer in Silicon Valley, he emerged as a telecommunications director at Qualcomm and then at Novatel Wireless .

Artist

Beginning an art career as a painter, Beaulieu received awards from The Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi [1] , the 17th Annual Delta Art Exhibition [2] . After placing at the 1975 Artists Biennial at the New Orleans Museum of Art , his work was reviewed in La Revue Moderne. [3] Giving two one-man shows at Laurie Auditorium Gallery in San Antonio collectors took note, among them Joe Nicholson, industrialist Marshall Steves Jr., and Dr. Donald Rubel. Moving to Northern California in 1976, Beaulieu exhibited and received awards at state and local galleries. [4] Stylistically, Mark’s art works have connections to Pop Art , and Photorealism . His pieces are often of urban landscapes, gardens, sandscapes, and waterscapes, featuring complex painterly color spaces.

Software Career

Beaulieu transitioned to software first creating digital paintings in 1976 at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center ( Xerox PARC ) with SuperPaint , "the first complete digital paint system.” In 1980 he entered the Ph.D. program for software at UC Irvine, but left to cofound Metatext Computers in Irvine, California inventing its markup language, parsers, and system software for batch processing for phototypesetters. He began a professional career as a software engineer in 1993 for Silicon Valley startups including Metaphor Computers , General Magic , and Forethought which later sold its PowerPoint software to Microsoft. [5]

As a software consultant for his company Digital Lantern, Beaulieu developed proprietary algorithms for naming services, [6] producing trade terminology for General Magic and other companies. For Go Systems he generated PenPoint as the name of their operating system. In 1993 he created the Digital Cities Restaurant Guide, one of the first computer restaurant guides. [7] The software featured geocoded and deep content for the 3,200 San Francisco restaurants [8] and eventually all 14,000 restaurants in the SF Bay Area. The interface was co-designed by Nathan Shedroff [9] . Some of the Digital Lantern concepts and user interfaces are seen on Yelp.com. Designed for Powerbooks, the software was sold by Apple Computer and affiliate stores, the content updated every season. The product was widely reviewed in the Bay Area. [10] Terry Winograd asked him to present the salient concepts of his innovative interfaces, predictions for emerging deep personal content at an HCI seminar at Stanford University [11] 

Beaulieu coauthored Demystifying Multimedia for Apple Computer in 1993, retitled as Multimedia Demystified in 1995 with portions of his research removed to promote commercial topics [12] . Research interviews for the book showed that top designers were interested in understanding multimedia principles. He taught the core of these findings as an instructor for the SFSU Multimedia Studies Program [13] in the first and third quarter of 1996 in the course "Understanding Media: The Individual and Society with Marshall McLuhan,” and invited Eric McLuhan to lecture at the SFSU program. Beaulieu programmed a multimedia kiosk for Apple Computer that presented the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. [14] The kiosk was exhibited at special events such as Siggraph 1995 LA for the opening of the Blue Man Group . [15]

In 1996 he transferred Digital Cities assets to Vivid Travel Network and worked as their director of product development helping to develop a 25 language web-based international travel guide. [16][17] Branded as Digital Cities he sold the name to AOL for their Internet platform. When VTN dissolved, Beaulieu created the United States Restaurant Guide which featured over 550,000 US restaurants. Content was licensed by companies including Discover card. USRG.COM was later sold.

Beaulieu began writing the book Wireless Internet Applications and Architecture [18] while at ICRAS, a subdivision of General Magic. He invited cell phone inventor Martin Cooper who wrote a significant forward, and FCC chairman Tom Wheeler who contributed promotional text [18] . The book became an international teaching text for the design and development of mobile applications. Beaulieu focused on a telecommunications career working as a software director at Qualcomm and Novatel Wireless .

Photographer

Beaulieu returned to his art career in 2008, focusing on digital photography and printing. "Three Doors of the Petroveil" was awarded first place by Arthur Ollman, Director of the San Diego Museum of Photographic Arts in the “Beyond the Lens” exhibition that opened the Municipal Gallery in Escondido, CA. [19] Beaulieu collaborates with digital artist David Em photographing California freeways. They exhibited their prints in The Secret Life of Freeways [20] in 2009. Since then he has focused on sand-scapes, and complex natural settings.

Novelist

In 2012, Beaulieu began writing a six-volume historical fiction series based on twelve years of detailed research on the medieval life of Eleanor of Aquitaine completed in 2019. he series builds on revised views of historians covering her dramatic reign in France, England, her part in the 2nd Crusade, and the 12th-century shift to romantic love via her courts. The books feature his cover illustrations and detailed reconstructions of ancient maps. [21] His research was presented to the Historical Novel Society in Denver, June 2015. The final book will be published in 2018. The series called The Eleanor Code was written to serve as a miniseries.

He and his wife wrote  The Artists Cookbook in 2014, focusing on art-oriented cooking.

Reference Paintings 

The following large-scale photorealist acrylic airbrush on canvas paintings made in 1973-1979 exist in collections in the United States.