| |
Bill Hinz is known primarily as a fabric artist. He was chairman of the Design, Craft, and Fiber Departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught for four decades, and in the 1950s and '60s he and his wife also ran a flourishing wallhanging design and production company. His focus remained on fiber design until the early-1980s when he became interested in the recently-available personal computer. Using one of the first of these models, a Commodore Amiga, Hinz taught himself programming and produced a small number of ink plotter drawings, which are exhibited here.
A number of artists had been using the computer in their work since the mid-1960s, and in most cases the style of this work had been geometric or modular, and more easily suited to the step-by-step approach of a computer program. These examples of Hinz's work, though, are interesting for the way they show the outlook of an artist preoccupied with fiber and line, and his attempts to convey this using a computer program and a plotter. Whilst a few of the images seem at first glance to have the mathematical feel of many early computer drawings, when looked at closely they reveal a looser, design quality, that in some cases looks like the warp and weft of a woven fabric, or in others the close-up view of a strip of fabric.
Click here to see computer-related works by other artists.
|
|
