In sorting through my mother’s estate after her recent demise I came across a birthday card that I had made for her when I was first using the computer at The Slade. It would probably have been 1978.

The first project that I did using the computer was based upon the sculptures that I had been making on my undergraduate course at Bristol Polytechnic. I had been arranging ‘modules’ in a regular grid pattern on the ground. Using the computer I was able to arrange them in 3D space without worrying about gravity. Note that the graphics library we used at the time did not have a hidden line removal option, hence the ‘wireframe’ rendering. I began to enjoy the ambiguity caused by the perspective projection of 3D shapes onto the 2D plane of the drawing. Fascinated by the way we see stars as if on a hemispherical surface, I had explored the phenomenon at Bristol with a model of the nearest twenty stars to our sun. I later transferred that data to computer drawings too.

Very soon I came up with the idea that plotter drawings should be about drawing rather than sculptural forms. So I changed the shapes that I was getting the computer to plot. I wanted to get it to make marks that were gestural, as if drawn by hand, to invoke the visceral feel one gets when seeing work made by human hand. To achieve this some of the pieces used brush pens instead of mapping pens to plot the images (like the one in the photgraph below). Also, rather than sticking to the standard red green blue and black inks that I saw being used by other artists, I took a lead from printing techniques and used cyan, magenta and yellow coloured inks instead.

There’s more about my early computer graphics here: https://stephenbell.org.uk/ranstak/index.html