My story and my goals
Simply put, I use math and computer programs to make pretty pictures. I also use a paintbrush and canvas, but this site primarily focuses on the first.
It has been an incredible, pin-wheeling journey to get to this point. My interests have always been quite varied: math, science, literature, photography, all things space, railroads, movies. I briefly worked part time as a location scout when I graduated college, but the lack of work and hand to mouth, free-lance nature of the business didn't let me pay the bills. Besides, something else was calling me. Wanting to give back to the community, I got certified to teach math and English and took a job at a high school for at-risk students. Talk about a challenge.
To a lot of kids, math is nothing more than an esoteric exercise in repetitiveness. Solve for x, graph this, prove that. Over the course of my teaching career, I had to seize upon different approaches to make math more interesting and more approachable. Applying mathematic principles to making art was one of them. We tessellated. We created chaos.
That was a career ago. But the use of math, especially the idea of using chance, probabilities and randomness to generate art has stuck with me. We make choices all of the time in life and in art. An artist is faced with myriad of choices; the medium, the subject, the method, the color, and the constraints of those choices, just to name a few. I try to express that in my work. I don't know how a work really is going to turn out, because every time I run a program, the result is different. Depending on the constraints I set, it dances between order and chaos. Just like life.
It's a bit like jazz, too. Like a jazz combo decides the key or mode, I may decide on a color palette, but unlike an improvising musician, the computer takes over from there, using probability, chance and randomness to place and color the pixels on the screen.
Color is my jazz.
I've got two immediate goals for this website/store:
1) Break even. If I sell enough to pay the upkeep for the website and domain name, I'll consider it a success!
2) After reaching the first goal, my second is to generate a little bit extra income. Got a kid starting college soon.
My long term goal? Hmmm. It would be nice to make a living doing this.