Daily Inspiration: Meet Dominick Domingo

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dominick Domingo.

Hi Dominick, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born with a paintbrush in my hand. I got my first typewriter for Christmas at the age of seven—around the same time I took my first oil painting class at Burbank’s Creative Arts Center. Though the instinct was unexamined at the time, I was clearly a storyteller at heart. I attended Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where I’d attended Saturday High, cementing my love of visual communication. Halfway through their demanding Illustration program, I interned at Disney Feature Animation and was offered a job. After graduating Art Center with distinction, I began working as a Background Painter on a tiny film to become known as <i>Lion King.</i> I continued on in both LA and Paris, painting backgrounds and visually developing <i>Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Little Match Girl </i>and <i>One By One</i>. After those 11 years with Disney, I transitioned into live action filmmaking, first attending New York Film Academy (counter-intuitively, here in L.A.!) My films won awards and garnered distribution in the festival circuit. Realizing my Original Screenplay credits constituted a writing resume, I put my lifelong love of writing on the front burner. My short stories and essays have been published in anthologies and won awards, most notably the Solas Award for Best Travel Writing, Craft Literary and Writer’s Digest. My Young Adult Urban Fantasy trilogy, <i>The Nameless Prince,</i> was published by Twilight Times Books in 2012 and 2016, with the third installment forthcoming. At the moment, my author platform has expanded to include podcast, ‘Language of the Soul’ and I narrate audiobooks for Audible and other platforms.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Few of us born without a silver spoon in our mouths can say life is a smooth road! Once I built momentum and discovered alchemy on my journey, things were stable and secure. But the moment I took creative risks with my career, along came struggle. My career-related challenges have had mostly to do with old tired tropes like the intersection of art and commerce, not enough funding for the arts, deprioritization of the arts as a cultural value, and most recently, limited opportunity for dinosaurs like myself. We live in a youth-oriented culture, and entertainment is even more so. Animation may be the worst. My Art Center students get hired right and left, while we veterans with production experience often can’t get arrested. With every breath, I champion cultural prioritization of the experience that only comes with age, continued relevance, intellectual curiosity and reinvention!

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
In my gallery work, personal illustration or my literary work as an author, I tend to illuminate the subtext in life. I discovered in my thirties that everything I’d ever drawn, painted or written was meant to illuminate what I saw that others did not. Like Horton in Dr. Seuss’s <i>Horton Hears a Who,</i> I saw entire worlds on tiny clover blossoms when no one else in my world seemed to. In an unexamined way, my creations shed light on the metaphysical level of life, the subtext in every moment. Sometimes, in my writing, what I illuminated was psychological subtext—the subconscious neuroses or petty defense mechanisms that led to tragedy, or other times, the collective intelligence we call fate moving molecules and mountains despite a character’s free will. Still other times, it was the historical baggage or preconceived notions a character unknowingly brought to an interaction that became self-fulfilling prophecy or the energetic, vibrational undercurrent of a moment when suspended. All the stories I’d told, with word or image, centered on waking people up. Inspiring them—or conversely, jolting them into looking at—well, anything but the surface of things.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
This is a tough one; I don’t really have a favorite anything. Except maybe a favorite ice cream flavor, and it’s pistachio if you must know! If I had to pick, my favorite childhood memories (plural) center around time spent in the desert. I come from a long line of miners, prospectors and geologists. As such, much of my childhood was spent traipsing around the Mojave Desert along the Sierra foothills. I find the desert to be a sterile, tranquil place where the spirit is free to soar. Stark beauty is found in unexpected places–in strange juxtapositions or sparsely poetic stillness. The desert’s indelible imprint on my soul is a huge influence in my writing–from our grandfather teaching us to make obsidian arrowheads using a deer horn, to naming the many dragonflies who circled our grandparents’ great, stone swimming pool, to the frog races we’d conduct when it was empty. It’s the same for my sister, also an author. We’ve agreed that we are our most essential selves in the desert, minus all the identifiers of mind and ego. Put simply, in the desert I feel…<i>safe</i>.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.dominickdomingo.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/author_dominick_domingo
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheNamelessPrince
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/dominick-domingo-905841
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@LANGUAGEoftheSOUL-dc6ot
• Other: Languageofthesoul.buzzsprout.com