Systemic abstractors vs. pubic hair drawing

Big Hairy Bush, by Don Reylea (click to enlarge)

I really enjoyed finding out about the work of digital artist Don Reylea.  At first glance, my assumption was that he was drawing images by using pubic hair.  They were beautiful yet mysterious.  When I read about his process, it turns out that he uses a custom computer software application that is coded in Adobe Director and C++ to build an algorithm that goes through the process of making the drawing for him.  I appreciate the concept of Reylea to design a system that goes through many of the same visual thought-processes of an artist making a drawing.  The concept of deciding what to emphasize, what to subtract, hide, subdue...how to be reconcile control and tight rendering skills with improvisation, and gestural mark making.  Below Reylea discusses his creative and technical process on how he designs and achieves his results.

Part of Don Reylea's Artist Statement:

With programmatic art it is difficult or at least non-intuitive to capture the essence of struggle in a work. It is easy and often desirable to create optimized accurate algorithms that do exactly what you want them to do. If the programming is accurate there is never a need to erase. The obvious programmatic erasure is total deletion leaving no trace of what was there before. This project experiments with what happens when we try the non-obvious. We create algorithms that loosely render an image and then try to self correct the errors by erasing with a loosely accurate eraser. The hair particles are an ideal choice for a drawing tool. Because the hair grows erratically it will always grow out of bounds requiring an erasure. The eraser leaves remnants of what was there before, evidence of a struggle.

"Systemic Abstractors vs. Pubic Realists" is an exploration of conflict within a generative art work.

Technical Brief:

"Systemic Abstractors vs. Pubic Realists" is a custom software application that is coded in Adobe Director and C++.

In "Systemic Abstractors vs. Pubic Realists" there are several classes of program objects that battle on the image area for dominance and control of space. The systemic abstractors abstract what has already been drawn. They plot out a rectangle of space and create a concentric pattern based on pixel values surrounding them. The pubic realists are autonomous particles that grow hair and attempt to loosely render an image with a configurable degree of realism. The third class of objects are the erasers. There are two types of erasers, block erasers and hair particles that mutate into gray hairs. This class of objects evaluate the lighter areas of the source image and loosely determine whether the are is too dark. If so, the erasers erase.

Be sure to check out Don Relea's shockwave animation demonstrating the development of his images by clicking HERE.

To create your own Pubic Hair Images using Reylea's system, click HERE.