about

Working in graphic design and interactive media disciplines for over 3 decades, Maureen Kringen has applied a love of painting and a reverance for fine art to a design approach that is textural and illustrative, with a modern sensibility.

When the digital medium was only beginning to become capable of displaying rich visual environments, a combination of timing and a personal interest in unusual mediums landed Maureen in the computer gaming industry. Challenged with bringing a higher standard of design and beauty to the interactive platform, she explored ways to expand beyond current computer graphic limitations.

As Art Director at SEGA’s Southern California division, she trained and led a growing team of artists in the development of gaming environments and characters. Her team worked to push the boundaries of art and animation within a digital medium in it’s infancy. As Group Director, she had the opportunity to research and develop projects exploring the application of artificial intelligence and neural networks to broaden both the conceptual content of the interactive experience as well as the look and feel. With the advent of the public internet, her career focus shifted to graphic design and website development, again exploring how to push past the inherent graphic limitations of the internet platform and working to bring an organic and emotional quality to what was then a more detached digital landscape.

Whether interactive and interface design, print design or traditional brand identity development, Maureen has worked in collaboration with her clients to create a visual voice that would represent who they are, what they are about and foster meaningful connections to their unique client communities.

Maureen currently devotes her time to her first love: painting. Rediscovering texture, form and color through the painted medium, she is inspired by the textures and design found in nature and intrigued by the mystery, complexity and strength of emotion.

featured in

Print Interaction 2000 Digital Design Annual
Typographic Design: Form and Communication
Virginia Commonwealth University Textbook, Third Edition
Wired Magazine, Best Branding, Sonoma County Woodworkers Website
Disney Magazine, Best Game Graphics 1992
The Society of Illustrators, New York 1985

services

Working in the visual arts is essentially a journey of discovery - a search for what can invoke a feeling simply by looking at something. Finding balance, getting something to look right, to “feel” right, requires surrender and a willingness to allow the work to lead and to inform.

It’s a letting go of preconceptions in order to understand what lies beyond what we know, or think we know.

This can be a challenging, and humbling practice. It begins as a conversation with the work itself and leads, hopefully, to a connection with those who engage with it.

The process and its result hold the potential to intrigue, to draw us closer and to make visible what is sacred within the mundane.
Ultimately, art can reclaim within us a sense of awe - connecting us to something beyond ourselves and to something that dwells deep within, simultaneously. For me, it doesn’t get better than that.