John Shier

"I am a self-taught artist living in Minnesota. Some might call me a geek.

"My work is purely algorithmic -- no paint, no photos in any form, no Photoshop, no Illustrator. No objects are placed by mouse. The image is entirely created by a computer program written by me. I have chosen to pursue representational art, especially "synthetic landscapes". A naturalistic look is achieved by the extensive use of random numbers. Thus no two "things" in an image have exactly the same shape, color, position -- as in nature. All of the images are created using a vector graphics format, i.e., they consist entirely of uniformly-colored hard-edged regions. Some vector source files are as large as .25 Gbyte and have near-photographic levels of detail.

"This art owes much more to applied mathematics than to pure mathematics.

"Artists I especially admire are Grant Wood (for his landscapes), Hiroshige and Hokusai, Hiro Yamagata. The works of Benoit Mandelbrot and Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier have been sources of algorithmic ideas."

John Shier's art on the Web

John Shier's AutoGallery exhibit