Robot-Assisted, Partially-Automated Drawings

Surfacing, 2012 to 2013

"In the creative state, a man is taken out of himself." - E. M. Forster

"The main thing in making art is often letting go of your expectation and your idea." - Agnes Martin

"Forget yourself; become one with eternity; become part of your environment." - Yayoi Kusama

Images

Video 1

Robot-Assisted Drawing by Terry Reynoldson.

Process

Video 2

Robot-Assisted, Partially-Automated Drawing by Terry Reynoldson.

Statement

When I started making art in a serious way, during my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1985, I chose drawing as my favourite means of expression. I would begin my drawings by soaking sheets of Mayfair Cover Stock in water to get them really wet. Mayfair paper is made with wood pulp and so it disintegrates rapidly, but before that could happen I would cover the sheets with different materials such as ink, Conté crayons and compressed charcoal. Before it dried, I slowly and deliberately ripped the paper to create organic shapes and contrasting values.

At the time, I couldn't articulate why ripping wet paper and mucking around with multiple mediums was so much fun. I've since learned that I was "automating" the creation of my drawings by allowing forces beyond my control - friction, gravity, evaporation - to have a constructive AND destructive influence on the work. Relinquishing a bit of control over ones medium creates room for unexpected things to happen. Jean Arp, a member of the Surrealists, automated the creation of his collages by allowing gravity and air resistance to determine where the shapes would be placed. He dropped pieces of paper from a height onto a support and then glued them where they landed, thereby creating artworks "according to the laws of chance". (Click here to learn more about Jean Arp.)

Later I began using other materials such as cardboard and burlap, which I cut with a band saw and burnt with a propane torch. All of my ripping, cutting and burning usually resulted in a huge mess that needed a lot more work before it resembled art and so I glued the pieces together in layers. As I added more and more layers, the drawings became thicker and thicker until some of them hung nearly a foot off the wall! After that, I had to concede that I was making sculptures instead of drawings.

The joy of making these works was in the discovery of the materials and what they could do. I had no preconceived ideas about how the drawings would turn out: automation makes that impossible. Instead I worked in a responsive and intuitive way. These experiences were very liberating and satisfying for me, but my drawings didn't have much appeal for many of my instructors.

I remember quite vividly a brutal critique that I had with a visiting artist who chewed me out because he thought that my artworks were "too formal and not conceptual enough".Unfortunately, I was very inexperienced and unable to defend my working method. After teaching art for the past 20 years and making art for over 30 years, I can now look back and confidently state that he was DEAD WRONG: an exploration of spontaneous and intuitive creativity is an excellent reason to make such artworks. (Below are images of some of those drawings.)

Now, almost thirty years later, I've used a similar approach to produce a new body of drawings. I begin by using automated and semi-automated methods to add a layer of linear elements onto heavy, 100% rag paper: simple robots constitute a fully-automated method; shoe polish applied with an electric drill is a semi-automated method.

Over the course of several hours, hundreds of individual lines accumulate to create rhythmic patterns that twist and turn and intersect with one another. When I am happy with the result, I turn to a variety of mediums - acrylic paint, ink, shoe polish, markers, wax crayons, compressed charcoal, powdered graphite, Conté crayons - to add layer upon layer of translucent colour, texture and shape until a luscious and sensual surface appears. During the later stages of this process, it can seem as though the drawing is "making itself". This is always the most exciting part of the work because anything can happen: the drawing could be headed for the trash can or it can suddenly "gel" and turn into something more amazing than anything I could have planned.

When the work is finally complete and I can step back to have a look, it often feels as though I've just surfaced, slightly disoriented after been submerged in a parallel universe consisting only of colour, shape, line and texture.

A psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced, chik-sent-me-high) uses the word "flow" to describe a similar experience and suggests that happiness can be attained whenever we allow ourselves to be completely and totally absorbed by what we are doing. Perhaps the lesson that my drawings are teaching me is that the simple act of giving up control allows a greater degree of engagement with the work: a counter-intuitive discovery that might have something in common with meditation.

This new direction is a refreshing change from the plodding, labour-intensive way that I've been working for the past few years. The spontaneity of drawing with multiple mediums really does make carving stone seem micro-managed by comparison. I've come to the conclusion that the investment of time, labour and money is so huge when making stone sculptures that it's virtually impossible to allow chance to direct ANY part of the creative process. When it comes to reductive sculpture, you only get one shot at it! On the other hand, if I destroy a drawing that I've been working on for a few days (which has happened more than once) I simply get out a new piece of paper and begin again.

I've even taken this process into the classroom to teach my students about "letting go" and "allowing the world to enter their work", as suggested by Robert Morris in an essay that he wrote in 1970:

What is ... shared by many 20th-century artists is that some part of the systematic making process has been automated. The employment of gravity and a kind of "controlled chance" has been shared by many ... in the materials / process interaction. However it is employed, the automation serves to remove taste and the personal touch by co-opting forces, images, processes, to replace a step formerly taken in a directing or deciding way by the artist. Such moves are innovative and are located in prior means but are revealed in the a posteriori images as information. Whether this is draping wax-soaked cloth to replace modelling, identifying prior "found" flat images with the totality of a painting, employing chance in an endless number of ways to structure relationships, constructing rather than arranging, allowing gravity to shape or complete some phase of the work - all such diverse methods involve what can only be called automation and imply the process of making back from the finished work.

Automating some stage of the making gives greater coherence to the activity itself. Working picks up some internal necessity at those points where the work makes itself, so to speak. At those points where automation is substituted for a previous "all made by hand" homologous set of steps, the artist has stepped aside for more of the world to enter into the art. This is a kind of regress into a controlled lack of control. Inserting the discontinuity of automated steps would not seem, on the face of it, to reduce the arbitrary in art making. Such controlled stepping aside actually reduces the making involvement or decisions in the production. It would seem that the artist is here turned away from the making, alienated even more from the product. But art making cannot be equated with craft time. Making art is much more about going through with something. Automating processes of the kind described open the work and the artist's interacting behaviuor to completing forces beyond his total personal control.

Robert Morris, "Some Notes on the Phenomenology of Making: The Search for the Motivated," Artforum VIII no. 8, April 1970, pp. 62-66. (Click citation to read the essay).

Click this link to see the lesson plan for first year drawing students: Automated Drawing Project. I've also successfully facilitated this art project in an elementary school setting by repurposing motorized toys. Using tape, string and paper clips, the kids modified their old toys by attaching felt pens to them, which we let loose all at once on a large piece of drawing paper (see images below). It was a lot of fun and an eye-opening lesson for the kids, who learned that objects can be modified and used in many creative ways.