Toward Aesthetic Guidelines for Paintings with the Aid of a Computer

The author makes nonfigurative drawings and paintings that are the results of a procedure in which simple geometrical shapes and their combination were successively altered in specific ways. In 1968 she began to use a computer to assist her. The computer displays (on a CRT screen) images in which shapes and/or their arrangement are altered successively. When she sees a pleasing example that she may wish to execute as a drawing or a painting, she instructs the computer to record it on a plotter.

She has studied a number of such series in which alterations occur successively in small steps to determine which alteration is responsible for the appearance of a picture that she judges to be aesthetically superior to those that preceded it. She includes an example of of her judgment of the aesthetic quality of pictures chosen from a particular series.