The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
LIBRARY EXHIBIT FEATURES WORKS BY MARK WILSON
CORNWALL — Mutable: An exhibition of ink jet prints on canvas by Mark Wilson, is on view Jan. 8-Feb. 19 at the Cornwall Library, with an in-person opening reception from 4-6 p.m. Jan. 8.
Wilson, a longtime West Cornwall resident and digital art pioneer, created the show “Mutable” that features work that is generated using Wilson’s proprietary software and printed on canvas with large format archival ink jet printers, according to a statement.
Wilson began his career making complex geometric paintings and drawings. In 1980 he began using computers and learned to program his own software.
In an interview with Geoform, the online scholarly resource for abstract contemporary geometric art, Wilson said on his process, “Writing software can be very intuitive. Even with a very formally defined programming goal, there are usually many different ways to achieve that goal. Choosing a good path to achieve the goal is a question of intuition, judgment, intelligence, and probably a thousand other things. In my case I don’t have a formally defined goal — except to make what I hope are interesting pictures. So I’m juggling these various algorithms — these recipes — in my software, adding a bit more here, taking some away there. I could almost describe my working process as ‘ Algorithmic Expressionism.’ This might be a bit of hyperbole, but again, I don’t have a formal goal. I follow the process where it leads me.”
When he first began creating computer-generated work, Wilson said he used pen plotters, which limited certain aspects of desired artistry. For the last 20 years, he has used specialized ink jet printers. Through his self-taught ability to program the computers, he creates a variety of complex geometric images, each progressively altered in form and color by the computer’s employment of algorithms. The artistic process continues right up to the final selection of images to be printed, he said.
Wilson has lived in West Cornwall since 1971. His computergenerated works have been widely exhibited, both in the U.S. and in Europe. He participated in many of the most influential exhibitions of computer art; including SIGGRAPH art shows, “Computers and Art” at the IBM Gallery, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, and the “Digital Pioneers” exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The National Endowment for the Arts awarded Wilson an Artists’ Fellowship in 1982, and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts has given him several grants. Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria, awarded Wilson the Distinction in Computer Graphics in 1992. He has taught, lectured, and has been a visiting artist at a number of institutions including the University of California at Santa Barbara, Yale, and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Wilson is a graduate of Pomona College. At the Yale School of Art, he studied painting with Jack Tworkov and Al Held, and received an M.F.A. in 1967.