About

My name is David Neill and I created DNARTX as a home for many of my creative musings.

What is DNARTX? DNARTX is simply a name reflective of my initials: DN, art: ART, and Texas: TX. Very profound, I know.

I began this journey as a photographer, following in my dad’s footsteps. My father has always carried a camera and binoculars everywhere he went. He would share slide shows of all of our family trips. He would use his photos in class, a biology professor of 45 years. Today, he has thousands of slides from those ’70s and ’80s experiences which bring to life the memories of my childhood. He also still goes out every day (in his 80s) taking pictures of birds, wildlife, and plants on his daily adventures.

From this, I developed a love of capturing moments through photography. As someone who loves history, photography is uniquely capable of telling stories when words often fall short. There is emotion, connection, and a language found in the light of a photograph. There is a way to find beauty in the simple things and capture it, however fleeting it may be. I try to do that, though I’m not as good at it as I want to be.

I shoot whatever catches my eye. Oftentimes that means it’s coming from my always available iPhone. Others, I’m deliberate about hunting a specific shot and I bring my Sony a7 along. Either way, it helps keep the spirit bright to look for moments in each day to capture for eternity.

Building out this web presence has motivated me to find and cultivate all of the old photographs, hard drives, and memory cards I’ve stashed over the last 15+ years.

Every photo here is my own work from behind the camera. The content here has been shot on Sony a7R VI, Nikon D750/D7000/D80, and Apple iPhone platforms. There may even be some old Nikon N80 content that I get digitized. The process of cataloging all of it is daunting, but incredibly rewarding. A reminder that a photograph can take you back in time and bring back scents and subtle sounds you had long forgotten.

Beyond photography, I’ve always had a love of music. Whether playing music (I play several instruments very poorly), seeing live music, or just listening, music has been a centerpiece of my life. I could draw an epoch chart of the themes of my years from a musical perspective. Many of my friends could draw this too.

With the advent of tools such as Ableton, FL Studio, and now tools such as Suno, I’ve been able to take ideas and concepts and turn them into real, tangible musical output. This has been a lot of fun and very rewarding for me.

The first concerted effort doing this was creating Teewinot.

When I was a kid, walking through the mall, I always loved the stores like The Nature Company and Natural Wonders. They always had rain sticks, interesting books about nature, distinct aromas, and world music. Teewinot was born out of my love for this genre of music that I loved as a kid. Drawing inspiration from Deep Forest, Enigma, R. Carlos Nakai, among many others, I created a concept album called Canyonlands. It was my first effort in trying to build enough content for a whole album and arrange it in a manner that tells a story if you listen to it front to back in order. I’m not sure how successfully I did it, but it was a great experience and a lot of fun.

From that, I created a second album called Path of the Imperishable. This was inspired by watching documentaries about ancient Egypt and thinking that the music playing was pretty awful. Not that mine is any better, but it gave me inspiration to create another concept album with a different musical theme under the name Teewinot. (As an aside, Teewinot is a mountain in the Teton Range in Wyoming. That area of the world holds a special magic for me, hence the origins of the name.)

In addition to Teewinot, I make music for my kids’ sports teams, podcasts, fantasy football diss tracks (why not?) and any number of other things that need theme music.

You never know, there may be new albums and personas popping up soon!

Beyond photography and music, I’ve enjoyed using AI tools for art projects. I’ve used a number of different tools to make logos for teams, schools, and organizations. I’ve also had a lot of fun learning prompt engineering to take more complex concepts and turn them into usable art. Some of it is AI slop, some of it is a little better. All of it is me learning how to better use tools and techniques to turn what is in my head into something tangible.

All of that is to say that this is a fun hobby and DNARTX is the home for a lot of it.