Aaron Marcus says he was a nerd as a child.
“I built my own imaginary rocket ship control panel, which my brother and I flew to other planets,” he said.
In addition to building things, he also drew. A comic book fanatic, “I taught myself how to draw in the style of Walt Disney and Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner,” he said.
And while he was encouraged by his mother and art teachers from elementary school through high school, “I didn’t know how to make a living as an artist. I thought I’d die a bum in the Bowery in New York City.”
Hardly. The Berkeley resident went on to have a long, rewarding career in the field of computers: The first graphic artist to work with computer graphics, he became a pioneer in designing user interfaces. He’s written six books, and was on the faculties of Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley before opening his own firm in 1982. Aaron Marcus & Associates, which he said was the first independent, computer-based graphic design firm in the world, has consulted with such companies as Apple and Nokia.
He recently sold 21 pieces of original computer graphic work to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art and has donated many others to that museum as well as to Mountain View’s Computer History Museum.
But at 72, he’s returned to his first love, drawing, as a way to connect with his grandchildren.
Marcus grew up Conservative in Omaha, Nebraska. His paternal grandfather helped found the shul where his family was active. Since landing in Berkeley in 1979 via Israel and a short stint in Honolulu, he has been a member of Congregation Beth Israel.
“I was an Orthodox groupie with a touch of anarchy when I moved to Berkeley,” he said.
While he also has been involved with Chabad in Berkeley, he calls himself “Conservadox,” as he is mostly but not strictly observant.
As an aside, Marcus said that he is often tapped to give lectures and tutorials around the world about cross-cultural communication, and the organizers, without consulting him first, often schedule these events on Shabbat.
“Whenever that happens, I think, ‘What are you doing, HaShem? … HaShem is, among other things, some jokester and incredibly funny.”
With three grandchildren outside the area — two are in Austin, Texas, and one in Berlin — Marcus relies on Skype to stay close to his family. Because Skype conversations with young children can sometimes be less than satisfying, he came up with a unique way for them to interact.
Each weekend, his Austin grandchildren — Lily, 6, and Owen, 4 — get on Skype with their grandfather and draw. (One-year-old Frieda in Berlin is still a bit young for that kind of communication, but no doubt it will happen.)
“It’s a way to keep them busy and amused,” he said. “While we draw together, and they draw stuff, we also do command drawing, in which they tell me what to draw, and I draw whatever they say, which right now, happens to be a lot of toilet and poop stuff.”
But earlier this year, inspired by the cartoonist R. Crumb, he started creating his own cartoons based on the Torah portion of the week. Given that his grandchildren are less observant than he is, he thought adding them into the cartoons could be a way “to keep them connected to Yiddishkeit.”
He has also drawn the Hebrew letters for Lily, which she has been copying.
“I haven’t drawn [by hand] in so many years, so I feel these are clumsy,” he said, “as I have to rediscover all my techniques. Each one takes about three hours to do, and I don’t get the intricacy that I’d like, but for me, being able to draw again is very satisfying.”