Tom Ellman
Website: https://tomellman.com
I never thought I’d be an artist. When I was young, art was frivolous. Science was serious, and I was a serious young man. Mom was art. Dad was science. I was a boy with four sisters. I went with Dad. So in college I studied math, physics and computer science. I taught at Rutgers and Vassar. But then, almost by accident, things began to change. Before we get to that, let’s go back in time.
In eleventh grade, I studied algebra and trigonometry. We used equations, pencil and graph paper to plot parabolas, ellipses, and waves: Choose some x values. Calculate their y values. Mark a dot for each (x,y) pair. Then connect the dots. “Wow! Equations can make pictures.” It was marvelous. I was utterly fascinated. Smitten with love. Nobody told me I was doing art.
When I arrived at Vassar, I was assigned to teach computer graphics – a field I had never studied. So I gave myself a crash course: Combine the physics of light with the algebra of shape and perspective projection. Encode in a program and then press “Enter”. “Wow! What a surprise!” It was much more than I expected. I fell in love again with my old high school sweetheart. I was still not doing art.
Mom died. I had to carry on. Art suddenly looked different. Not frivolous at all. I joined with a sculptor colleague to develop and teach a course in computer animation. I also began to teach courses in media studies. I made some computer-animated movies myself and showed them to a few friends. They encouraged me and here I am.
Generative art can be roughly defined as follows: The artist writes a computer program. The running program generates an image. The code usually has switches and parameters that the programmer / artist can manipulate to obtain a variety of resulting images. Thus generative art comes in families of related works. For this reason, I often arrange my generated images in groups that suggest relationships among members of a family.
I often read and think about mathematics, art and the relation between them. Math has much to offer the visual arts, both as a conceptual framework for imagining new works and as a language of shape, structure and dynamics that can play a role in art criticism. In my creative work I’ve been exploring combinations of order and disorder: systematic designs mixed with quasi-random shapes; repetitive patterns that are broken; symmetries with flaws. I see the boundary between order and disorder as a source of metaphors for aspects of human experience.
Generative art is not broadly accepted and valued in the world of visual fine-arts. Critics often say it’s overly precise, rigid, cold and devoid of human elements. I often agree. But I hope to win them over with calculated errors; precise ambiguities; and literal ironies to make generative art with a human face.
Why go to all this trouble? My art-self (Mom) and my science-self (Dad) never got along very well. I – in the middle – am determined to make them reconcile.
My work is occasionally on display at the Tivoli Artists Gallery in Tivoli, New York and Roost Art in New Paltz, New York.
