Plotter Drawings

George W. Hart

This page shows some early work of mine---drawings executed on a plotter in the years 1981-1982. Above is "People" which shows a pile of people acrobatically arranged. Click on the thumbnails below for recent scans of a few other plotter drawings that have survived from this period.

	Donut Can you draw a donut without lifting your pen from the paper? Here is one way! Someday I'll build one of these as a sculpture...
	Egg This form fits right in with my recent spherical sculpture, but is generated as a fish-eye transformation of a tessellated plane.
	A Boy and His Dog After reading Mandelbrot on fractals, I started generated many on the screen. This one struck me in a Rorschach way, so I plotted it.
	Snowflakes This is my favorite from that period. Each flake is unique, psuedo-randomly generated, but modelled on the photographs in Bentley's book.
	People 2 More people, geometrically arranged. Each (except on the edges) touches neighbors at five points: head, hands, and feet. The exact position of the joints is pseudorandomly chosen.

For those unfamiliar with it, the plotter is a computer-controlled pen. It is actually a wonderful artistic medium, because it can be very precisely controlled and can use archival materials (permanent inks and acid-free paper). Behind each of these drawings lies a small computer program which controls the movement of the pen. Shortly after this period, I moved on to other activities and have not returned to this medium.