What it is all about on this site...

On this site visitors can find what is keeping me busy: digital visual art, design, poetry and (apart of my weblog “Pointer’s Weekly) reduced amounts of critical or introducing comments and statements, while not needed with the more universal language of visual art.

Like every common human I am born. That was at March 31, 1941 and only the birth weight of 16.53 lbs (7.5 kg) was strange. I should not have to become a heavy-weight but what else? I thought about it and found something that always works. Do something where you are good in and do it – to avoid wasted effort - as good as you can, so, half a century ago I have chosen to dedicate my life to arts, because that was incidentally my personal talent. I studied at the Academy of Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands, 1958-1963.

The question: "Why are we on earth?" could be answered and since then I only make beautiful things also from the beginning in the sixties with computers and modern electronic technology. It’s said that I was my time so far ahead, that most people have forgotten that I was the first. The reason was the opportunity to develop new ways of expression. Real new ways, so not the already existing ways with cameras, what even later is wrongfully called “new media”. There was nothing new on handling cameras. I didn't.

It never happened to me that I made something without the comments of others saying it would be better to make “common art” what people are used to. In retrospect it was admired, but people thought that programming computers was only a hype in the seventies and they thought that I became crazy when I plotted drawings with computers. It would fade away after some time. Learned scholars stated also that it is not possible - like art has to do - to catch and express emotion with computer-products. It is true that almost no artist sufficiently succeed in that aim. It is hard labour and most painful is that you need talent and vision too. Those who can’t make art without computers better don’t try it with computers. The art to arise is not in the computer but in the mind of the artist. Therefore a lot of waste is called art, but it isn’t.

Otherwise, you can make art with computers that can’t be made in another way and it is the normality aim only to make THAT. No imitations or mockery.

It’s always a funny joy that art has to do something with a subject.

Really?

Yes, different reasons, like relevance for society, but I don’t care that much about subjects while I am creating objects. It’s going as a matter of course. As soon as something shocking, characteristic, intriguing or intruding triggers my attention, it becomes automatically used in my work. It can be an image of nature, but also impressions of the WTC Twintowers tumbling down in the 9/11 event. In that sense there is also a depiction, but in the first place it is what it shows to be: a piece of art. In that sense it is hyper-realistic. In that sense is art only as abstract to perform with geometric forms.

During my now (2009) fourtyfive years long professional carrier I developed a characteristic own world of forms, always showing up in the objects, regardless the creative process or the used tools and techniques, also in paintings, ceramics, bronze statues, photo-spectrographic projects and computer-art, but alas for the layman with the same confusing versatility like with Pablo Picasso, the best of a foregoing generation, this apparently said with indebted regards.

It will be fine to overcome the fact, that renewing art can be complex, also in this times of minimal art and that art not always can be made by your youngest children or mental disabled persons.

Most of times the subject of a piece of art is only a motive to start making the object, leading to not always the same but different patterns and structures. Ai, don’t you see returning most of those figures in different pieces? O yes, of course, like in the music of Bach, but that is characteristically something else than with Mozart. People recognize the differences and the commons. It is called “style” and so I developed a personal style and work it out on my own manner. The relative simple mathematics and algorithms I use to shape formulas and generate my pictures is only in the mathematically approach comparable with fractals. The results are total different. This will be understood that I don’t use drawings of photos ore any other handmade input than mathematic formulas and my own computer-programs to generate the basics of my art. Photoshop or any other second-party program is only used as a minor cosmetic finish. So, the portrayed art isn’t the art I made, because that doesn’t exist at all. You will get what you see: the image of a virtual piece of art, made by a virtual camera, with virtual lights and virtual space, small on your screen or on a framed sheet, more than a quadrate meter large.

That will save you harsh problems with periodically cleaning the stuff.

In the early days of the revolutionary information-technology it became clear by insiders that we would dispose very precise and accurate fast tools in the digital world and I wanted to use that and suffered each delay in development. Learning to program computers wasn’t that hard. Those first computers were slow and had small memory but bookkeepers need not that amount of speed and sophisticated techniques we are used to by now. But there was really logic and predictability in the development and innovation of the hardware, so I could keep track on that, but never called the arising of new advances stormy, like those bookkeepers did. I worked with POV-Ray from the beginning but when I had a program written I had to wait a whole day until the plot was ready. Twentyfour hours is a long time. But in POV-Ray of the nineties you let the computer do a lot of work in complex algorithms. It’s not simple plain text of a word-processor. So it is not that strange that the attention of most “computer-artist” went to fractals and other figures without real expression. Wrongfully those tricks are called visual computer-art, but it is not art and has nothing to do with it, but being visual.

The problem with the fractals is that you can see amazing mathematics but as soon as you overcome your astonishment you are quickly tired of its exactly repeating structures. And a large amount of different colors can’t save the image from decent of interest. So it became in my logic to develop my own formulas for more variability in structures, patterns and forms and to do that I had to write my own parser, that generates pictures from my own formulas. Also the images in the page-heads of this site are made with POV-Pay and that has to do with mathematics too, but also nothing with fractals. Now you ca search Internet and find images of fractals, made by a mass of bunglers with a terrible want of taste. Well, it’s the same with paint, pencils and clay, but thinking about how many sweat and time it cost to produce the litter, you feel pity, so much labour and so less product. That all you can visually smudge per definition is creative and even art is one of the most distributed misunderstandings. Like not all what you can hear is music. It’s your mind’s eye that can be creative and making that visual for others is art. You have to practise the trade with talent, vision, inspiration, skills and discipline.