My artwork, in all its phases, explores form-making ideas that often lead us to experience the inexplicable.
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Roman Verostko, 2018
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Roman Verostko (b. 1929) had twenty-five years of studio and academic experience when he undertook writing code for generating his art. That experience included more than sixteen years of life as a Benedictine monk. After graduating from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in 1949, Verostko joined the monastery at Saint Vincent Archabbey in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. As a monk, he had studio access for his art, pursued philosophical and theological studies at the Saint Vincent Seminary, was ordained a priest in 1959, and was selected to engage in further study as an artist and educator in the arts. He was sent first to New York, where he received an MFA from Pratt Institute in 1961 and pursued elective graduate studies in art history at Columbia University and New York University. In the fall of 1982, he went to Paris where he continued his studies in art history at the École du Louvre and printmaking at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17. During those monastic years, influenced by the work and writings of Kasimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Piet Mondrian, he worked for a spiritual transformation of religious art and architecture.
In 1968, following a struggle with his own spiritual experience, Verostko departed religious life and joined the humanities faculty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, known at that time as the Minneapolis School of Art. With computer industries like Control Data, Cray Supercomputer, Honeywell, and UNIVAC in the metro area, he found a challenging new world of electronics. Seeing the awesome form-generating leverage of algorithms driven with computers, Verostko followed a course at the Control Data Institute where he was introduced to FORTRAN. As an artist, “in pursuit of ways to humanize our experience of emerging technologies,” Verostko received a Bush Fellowship and was invited by Gyorgy Kepes to work with him at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in the summer of 1970. With the advent of the IBM PC in 1981, Verostko brought computer leverage into his studio where he spent all his free time coding routines he viewed as his “score for art.” Following his first fully generative work, The Magic Hand of Chance (1982–85), he acquired a pen plotter and converted his studio into an electronic scriptorium with pen plotters as scribes. His master program of drawing routines grew from his experience as a painter. As his drawing program developed, it opened new form frontiers he could not have visualized without computing power. These code generated works, with “a visual life of their own,” continue the same quest for an art of pure form that he sought in his earlier work as a painter.
In 1968, following a struggle with his own spiritual experience, Verostko departed religious life and joined the humanities faculty at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, known at that time as the Minneapolis School of Art. With computer industries like Control Data, Cray Supercomputer, Honeywell, and UNIVAC in the metro area, he found a challenging new world of electronics. Seeing the awesome form-generating leverage of algorithms driven with computers, Verostko followed a course at the Control Data Institute where he was introduced to FORTRAN. As an artist, “in pursuit of ways to humanize our experience of emerging technologies,” Verostko received a Bush Fellowship and was invited by Gyorgy Kepes to work with him at the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies in the summer of 1970. With the advent of the IBM PC in 1981, Verostko brought computer leverage into his studio where he spent all his free time coding routines he viewed as his “score for art.” Following his first fully generative work, The Magic Hand of Chance (1982–85), he acquired a pen plotter and converted his studio into an electronic scriptorium with pen plotters as scribes. His master program of drawing routines grew from his experience as a painter. As his drawing program developed, it opened new form frontiers he could not have visualized without computing power. These code generated works, with “a visual life of their own,” continue the same quest for an art of pure form that he sought in his earlier work as a painter.
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The exhibition continues:
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