Roman Verostko
| Roman Verostko | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Joseph Verostko September 12, 1929 Tarrs, Pennsylvania, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Professor Emeritus at MCAD |
| Known for | algorithmic art |
Roman Verostko (born September 12, 1929) is an American artist and educator who creates code-generated imagery, known as algorithmic art. Verostko developed his own software for generating original art based on form ideas he had developed as an artist in the 1960s. His software controls the drawing arm of a machine known as a pen plotter that was designed primarily for engineering and architectural drawing. In coding his software Verostko conceives of the machine's drawing arm as an extension or prosthesis for his own drawing arm. The plotter normally draws with ink pens but Verostko adapted oriental brushes to fit the drawing arm and wrote interactive routines for achieving brush strokes with his plotters. In 1995, he co-founded the Algorists with Jean-Pierre Hébert.
Roman Verostko was born in Tarrs, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town fifty miles east of Pittsburgh. A painter in his early life, he also studied as a Benedictine monk at Saint Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, Pennsylvania from 1952 to 1968, joining the faculty there in 1963. His monastic travels took him to places such as New York, Washington, and Paris. After leaving religious life in 1968, he continued experimenting with automatic drawing that led him to explore methods of writing code to achieve some form of computer automatism. This led him to redirect all his artistic practices toward algorithmic art. He married Alice Wagstaff in August 1968. She was a psychologist and gave seminars at the monastery when Verostko met her. She died in 2009. He now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) from 1968 to 1994 and holds the title of Professor Emeritus.
After graduating from high school, Verostko studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where he received a diploma in illustration in 1949. In 1950 he entered the Saint Vincent Archabbey scholastic program for monks that included entrance to Saint Vincent College, monastic vows in 1954, a BA in philosophy in 1955,four years of Theology in the St. Vincent Major Seminary and ordination as a priest in 1959. While Verostko remained a monk attached to Saint Vincent Archabbey, he pursued graduate work in the early 1960s at other institutions, first in an MFA program at Pratt Institute in 1961, then studies in art history at New York University and Columbia University from 1961 to 1962. Verostko then traveled to Paris, where he studied printmaking at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 from 1962 to 1963, as well as took courses at the École du Louvre and visited religious sites. Much of Verostko's work in Paris "pursued visual manifestations of inner experience that transcended rational observation". For many of these 'automatic' works he maintained a private notebook of 'experience states' related to their execution". Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hayter worked very closely with the Surrealists, exploring semi-automated methodologies for image-making in the belief that its source was the irrational. Hayter also associated with many of the forerunners of the Algorists, among them Le Corbusier. Many of the themes Verostko would explore in his life's work - EXAMPLES - emerged in this time period in and around Paris.
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