SHOP THE STORY
EVER PURCHASE TELLS A STORY
Create Yours Today
Arts by Dylan has a new look, and is under ongoing construction.
Who is this Dylan?
About Me and Arts by Dylan
My name is Dylan Carpowich, and like much of my work, this website is a blend of old and new — art, history, family, and technology.
This website is years in the making, and originally went by the name "Fog Bank Gallery" with the logo of the Trans America Building. It has been created by my late father and I from the very beginning, cataloging my family library and hand photographing every book. Over the years I have learned a lot, but I also learned that life ends at some point for all of us. My father retired in 2017 after spending over 20 years as a public school teacher in Vallejo California, spending his entire career teaching English to the children of immigrants, he passed away in 2024 from cancer. We worked together during his retirement on this business and enjoying each other's company.
At the end of the day, success in business, relationships, career is not as important as spending as much time as we possibly can with those we love.
I approach my work much the same way I approach my photography: part documentary, part reflection, part storytelling. Inspired by my father’s early street photography, I’ve developed my own take — capturing the world as most people actually see it, from behind the windshield, with street signs, highways, and movement framing the shot.
This site reflects years of personal history, creative work, and the evolving relationship between art, memory, and technology.
Quick Facts about Arts by Dylan dot com
- Founded in 2017 as Carpowich Art and Photography llc.
originally under the D.B.A SunWavePhotos - Over 3,000 products available
including about 1,000 books with
detailed descriptions, hand
photographed by myself. - About 200 non a.i. written blog posts,
currently being re-organized and edited
into multiple blogs. (with the help of a.i) - like many artists, not that many sales
- Sustainable: Every item
results in a tree planted to help fight climate change - An ongoing artistic pursuit that hopefully won't ever end
Words of Wisdom from my Father
Everything may Happen for a reason, But not everything that Happens needs a reason.
arts by Dylan
Canvas Prints – Art That Captures Light | Arts by Dylan
"Shop the Story"
Isn’t just a slogan on Arts_by_Dylan_dot_com — it’s a mantra that keeps me creating even on the days when I don’t feel like making anything.
For most artists, the struggle is real isn’t a catchphrase — it’s reality. Creativity has been part of my life since I was a kid, first in the kitchen after my parents’ divorce, then in photography, video, writing, and design. Since 2016, I’ve written over 500,000 words, taken and edited thousands of photos and videos, and built a business one small project at a time.
Arts by Dylan is the result of that ongoing battle — not just with the creative process, but with the world’s expectations. It’s about carving a path using modern tools while staying aware of their limits. Some parts of our story get written by others — family, friends, jobs, relationships — and that’s part of it too. In life and in art, outside influence is unavoidable.
The secret is to keep writing your own chapter anyway.
What is Old is New Again
I was born in 1986, even though I grew up poor, my Dad recognized early on the importance of the personal computer. Living in Santa Cruz CA in the 1970's and 1980's he had a friend that would play the Chinese board game GO with Steve Wozniak, one of his old neighbors was one of the first 10 employees of Seagate when it was founded near Live Oak, (Santa Cruz).
I still have the box of an old Dot Matrix printer called "Image Writer II" my Dad purchased a Macintosh II for about $3,000 in 1989, it survived the Loma Prieta Earthquake while we were living in Watsonville.
That trusty Macintosh stayed with us when we moved to Sonoma when I was 5 in 1991. A few years later my Dad began looking for a new computer, the Macintosh couldn't otherwise connect to the new thing called "the internet."
In the early 1990's in the Bay Area, there was no e-machines, no dell computers, no HP that held a monopoly on personal computers. It was still entrepreneurial, still guys in their garages trying to be the next or Microsoft. Local fairgrounds held things called "Computer shows" in which local computer businesses would showcase their latest hardware and specifications.
I remember how big of a deal it was that they had just broken the 1 gigabyte barrier for a hard drive. Around 1994 my Dad replaced that trusty old Macintosh with a Windows based computer, that also cost about $3,000. It was state of the art with about 16 megabytes of RAM, a humongous hard drive of about 256 megabytes, and it was not just a CD Rom, it was a CD RW drive, and there was even a floppy disk slot, and a screaming fast 56k modem. We got it from a couple guys who built computers in San Francisco as a company called D.S.I, we got to know them after going to several fairs over several months in the Bay Area. I remember it being in 1994, because we waited for Windows 95 to be released and we purchased it with Windows 95 only a few days after it got released. But we went to about 8 computer shows in the Bay Area in the months before hand, all at county fairgrounds.
The Computer was state of the art for 1995, and it lasted a few years until about 1999 when we got some e-machine at Costco for a few hundred dollars that was multiple times more powerful. Which got replaced the same kind of way every few years.
Any way, I have fond memories of these early internet days, where you would meet someone with a website in 1997 or 1998 and it was impressive that the they had a website, when the internet had only a few hundred thousand other just around 1 million websites in existence.
Or you would ask your parent a question, and they would say "I don't know" look it up, so I would go onto google. Or even the funny times in which someone would try to use the landline telephone and scream "Who is on the Intenet!! I'm trying to use the Phone!"
Any way, those mentally ill good old days are long gone.
These memories have also produced my own internet conspiracy of sorts. I saw a commercial google recently put out in which they claim to have began in 1998. In 1998 I had already moved to Solano County from the town of Sonoma. But earlier when I was in elementary school in about 1995/96 just after getting that DSI computer, I had a substitute teacher for a few days from Santa Clara who asked my class who had access to the internet. About 8 of us raised our hand, and the substitute teacher asked what search engine we use, I said yahoo.
Then this guy informed us that there was a better option available created by some Stanford guys that searched the internet in a more efficient way, and the search engine was called Google. So I went home, put "google" into my yahoo search engine, and then never used yahoo again. I was a Googler from that day on.
So I have this core internet childhood memory, that Google now in 2025 tells me is a lie and couldn't have happened because it wasn't invented yet. Google is like trying to millennial meme; me by telling me my life is a lie, no it's not, Google existed a couple years before 1998. It's also probably not the only internet company that probably distorts its age. But also, this doesn't make google any different from the countless other people who have lied about their age on the internet.
