Random Generator, 2018

About the App

Chance has always been an element in my working practice as a painter and I am constantly looking for ways to allow that element to intrude. It occurred to me that some sort of 'generator of randomness' might be useful to my painting work. Having worked for some years as a designer and builder of websites, I decided to use my coding experience to develop an app which could essentially generate random colours on a blank canvas.

I quickly realised that a controlled environment was needed for the randomness to be effective so the basic concept was to have five vertical bars hanging from the top of the canvas and to use the 'Generator App', at the click of a button, to fill each bar with a randomly selected colour at a randomly selected length.

I created a blank canvas and chose a very small number of colours just to see if it was possible to make a working app at all. I had intended to select ultimately from a multitude of colours and lengths, but soon discovered that limiting the colours and the lengths actually made the resulting 'print' more interesting. Fewer colours make it more likely that the same colour appears multiple times creating large, irregular shapes rather than just a set of different coloured bars. And the blank areas of the canvas also read as shapes too.

What I find most interesting about the results is that they are often more extreme than anything I could devise as an acceptable arrangement of coloured shapes on a canvas. The machine has no sense of 'good taste' or 'harmony' or 'design' — it simply does exactly what it is told to do, and the results are often all the better for it.

Click HERE to use the App. If you want to make a painting based on a print, the colours and lengths of each bar are displayed between the buttons.

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About the App