Élan Vital has been in the international art scene for a very long time. Élan’s first break was being noticed by Andy Warhol who contracted him to build a light display for his psychedelic discotheque in NYC.
Élan then worked with a wide variety of artforms including wood and stone sculpture and eventually settled to Maui 1988. In 1989 he designed and created what is known now as “The Whale” a fixture of central Kihei. Nearly forty years later, you can still see “The Whale” directly across the street from Haui’s Life’s a Beach or even on Google maps as shown here.
After The Whale, Élan developed his signature process to create one of a kind paintings made from 35 to 70 layers of aerospace enamel and a variety of gemstones. He featured these paintings in his new gallery Élan Vital Galleries located in The Shops at Wailea mall in Wailea.
My work with With Élan Vital Galleries
In 2004 I was working as webmaster with a now defunct company; “Digimax” of Kihei, Maui. As their chief web developer they had me build the first version of the Élan Vital Galleries website among several others. Digimax shut down quite suddenly and I reached out to Élans business manager and let them know I had been building their website and associated products. I finished their website and screen-saver at no cost to illustrate my commitment and they contracted me for website maintenance, magazine ads, and yearly calendars, basically everything digitally based.
Eventually I came not only to host Élan Vital Gallerie’s website but also manage all their technical considerations online from their domains to all their online accounts login and preferences. I work with É still on occasion as he has continued to produce art and host galleries throughout california and now Pittsburgh, I have help them with digital newsletters and keep the website up to date with changes in location. I also continue to manage their online properties and accounts with online services.
The magazine ads I composed for Élan Vital Galleries appeared in local high end monthly’s for the Wailea tourist crowd including Maui Visitor, Guest Informant – a hardcover magazine that was installed in most of the hotel rooms in Wailea and Ka’anapali. In this decade I composed ads for Élan in Pacific Air Museum and Palm Springs Art Magazine.
I originally deigned Élan’s Calendars in 2008 and I continued creating them in the same style through 2015. They were a deep black on heavy gloss paper. The calendar’s were hand created each year by manually shifting the dates and holidays. The images changed each year to paintings from the year before. Each calendars uniform date pages we’re in two tone, white gradients into three colors that repeated quarterly for each year. Text was in MT Brush Script and Arial and colored deep black. To create the Calendar’s I utilized Adobe photoshop by reusing my hand created templates to create each new page. It was a great deal of fun producing beautiful calendars from his beautiful artwork.