Instead of pixels on a computer screen, one of the pioneers of the Bay Area multimedia industry now applies oils to canvas and wood, using the arts of the Renaissance masters to interpret his 21st Century concepts. “Everything was evolution,” Jeff Neugebauer says, looking back on events that led to founding SpiralWest Inc., which developed interactive multimedia projects for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500 giants.

It’s a perspective that requires the kind of time Mr. Neugebauer didn’t get until after the high tech and dot com implosions allowed him to step out of the high-speed lane. But his interest in art began when he was just out of the starting blocks of his career while studying business at Arizona State University. A part-time job as a junior draftsman at Motorola Corp. grew into full-time work as a designer.

“When I was at Motorola, I designed satellite communications equipment for the space shuttle, tactical communications equipment for survival radios, really interesting stuff,” Mr. Neugebauer says.

He also worked on heart pacemakers for a unit of Medtronic Inc. “We did all this with computer- aided design. At the time, to be in my early 20s and be a CAD designer was something,” he says. That, coupled with his growing interest in art, prompted him to move into multimedia in the late 1980s.

“Here I am wondering how to do multimedia in Arizona. It had just started and people really didn’t know what multimedia was,” he says.

Looking for kindred minds, Mr. Neugebauer moved to the Bay Area in 1993 to begin multimedia projects on floppy disks. “We designed everything in 16 colors. There were no tools, so a lot of it was done in C,” he says. “I was doing everything on an Amiga computer in those days.”

He started his own company after working for Iconic Inc. for about six months. “I realized they didn’t know any more than I did about this industry. We were all trying to figure it out. So why not start my own company instead of help this guy build his company” he recalls.

Mr. Neugebauer and a programming friend formed Looking Glass Interactive Inc. In a year, the partnership ended but Mr. Neugebauer continued the company as SpiralWest, concentrating on interactive multimedia projects.

“We did some great projects. We worked with IBM, we worked with Cadence (Design Systems Inc.), designing interactive learning material,” he says.

Other projects included the design of one of the Web’s first e-commerce sites for Miller Freeman in 1995 and, quickly thereafter, the prototype for what was initially called an “Internal Business Web Site,” now known as intranets, a project Mr. Neugebauer company did for Netscape Communications Corp.

“Wow! Netscape’s calling us. They saw our work on the Web,” Mr. Neugebauer says about the genesis of that project. “And lo and behold the Internet now had an intranet. It was really exciting for us to be involved in building this new brainstorm these guys had.”

As the Web industry started to blossom, moving into the Web space was relatively easy, he says, “and then it just went crazy.”

SpiralWest found itself growing very quickly. At one point, there were 15 people “stuffed into a thousand- square-foot office,” Mr. Neugebauer recalls. “It was fun. It was an exciting time. But I didn’t have the business experience to know how to grow a company quickly and correctly. I grew it very organically and cautiously. In hindsight, watching these companies that sold pet food online and thinking they got all this funding for ridiculous ideas, I thought I blew it.”

By late 1999 and early 2000, Mr. Neugebauer noticed other businesses were tightening up in offering them contracts. “We started burning cash [but] we were starting to not make as much as we had projected. Several of the companies we worked with were startups and when they got their funding pulled, they didn’t have any money to pay us. And then we were sitting there with people to pay… without the resources to make the ends meet,” he says.

When long-term customers began to not renew contracts, “that’s what started the whole crash for us,” he says. He started letting people go and “next thing I knew we were down to a skeleton crew,” he says.

By retaining a few large companies — Wells Fargo & Co., Intel Corp. and Century Theaters Inc.— which still needed projects done from time to time, Mr. Neugebauer was able to keep his much smaller company in business.

“Just enough to sort of scrape by,” he says. By 2004, he decided to keep the corporation but, aside from a project here and there, he would devote his efforts to his new business of being an artist.

“It did surprise me but I thought it was absolutely a great thing for him to do. I was very excited for him when he decided to move on to focus on his paintings,” says Alex Amado, now manager of marketing best practices at Macromedia Inc, and a former vice president of SpiralWest. “We did the boom. We did the bust. We survived. What impresses me about Jeff's decision is that he didn’t choose to do this when it would have been really easy. He made a very conscious decision. It’s not like he bailed out of the business,” says Mr. Amado.

Switching careers from CEO to artist impresses Arianne Kolb, former Getty Museum curator. “That’s something I really respect,” she says. “I think he’s talented. There are some wonderful artists out there, but when it comes to drawing a figure, they can’t draw. He definitely can.” Ms. Kolb says it’s too early to assess Mr. Neugebauer new career path. “There’s a bit of time necessary for artists to find their niche. It will be interesting to see what he does in the future,” she says. “It’s a tricky thing, success. Today [some] artists are so successful, they’re up there with corporate executives in terms of the money they make. To change careers and become an artist is a huge step. I think it’s very bold and admirable.”

Mr. Neugebauer initially works on his paintings with a Renaissance technique called verdaccio which is painting in greenish-grey colors. “Then I’ll use a digital camera to take a snapshot of it and put it in the computer. I’ll use the computer to start playing with colors. Instead of using paint to experiment and getting frustrated, the computer gives me the opportunity to try a hundred different colors in an hour,” he says.

A computer-less verdaccio was the technique used by Leonardo da Vinci in developing his masterpiece, the Mona Lisa. “So my computer experience is still used but it’s used in a way that helps expedite decisions,” Mr. Neugebauer says.

Mr. Neugebauer feels that after running SpiralWest for a decade, he’s had business experience that can be applied to the world of art.

“Ultimately, it all comes down to can you sell this or not?” So far, while some of his painting have been acquired by the ASU art gallery and others, his is not a household name among private galleries.

As boom-and-bust as the high tech and dot-com eras were, the business of art is often fickle, he admits. “An oil painting by a gorilla just sold for more than a Warhol at a recent auction,” Mr. Neugebauer says. “They were both at the same auction. But it was a very famous gorilla.”

DOUGLAS E. CALDWELL is a freelance writer based in Stockton.