Art & Math from the Soul

What a drag, two months study Art History & College Mathematics, could there be a worse use of my time right in the middle of my pursuit of a Bachelor Degree in Computer Animation?

First off, I dreaded the College Mathematics course worrying that my ability to comprehend the material would be lacking. And for what a waste of time taking critical days away from learning how to use powerful but complex tools like Autodesk’s Maya.

It’s been nearly 50 years since I last did battle with a math text, but surprisingly I breezed right through even the most difficult parts. Skills like Standard Deviation & Algebra came easy. This type of work was never beyond me, I had just been let down in Junior High School by teachers who couldn’t or wouldn’t take the time to tutor me over the hump of awareness of how math intersected with my life.

I expected Art History would be another kind of challenge. Coursework with just a bare mention Black artists, the entire Harlem Renaissance reduced to six paragraphs. I expected it to piss me off and it certainly did. But in the end, the course reawakened my interest in Abstract Art.

Now I’m thinking, is there a way to take this new knowledge and forge abstract art with my own personal stamp on it, but in the digital realm?

There is, and I’m going to use my love of the Commodore 64 to do it.

Quite a lot has happened since I last owned a C64, not the least of which there are Windows based emulators & coding IDE’s that allow me to quickly prototype applications before running them on hardware. It’s something that I would have never attempted (with a fair measure of success just one week in) without these courses.

Free from the terror of math, I’m tackling trigonometry and assembly language programming to make Digital NFT Art premised on the idea that math principles, some which go back millennia, can be used to create the shapes & colors of Abstract Art from my heart & soul.