I discovered Matt Niebuhr when I was searching on the web for oil pastel drawings. I came across an abstract drawing of a plaited structure in black and red. It is actually a mixed media work of oil pastel with graphite. I really like it. It is in stark contrast to the mostly naturalistic works using oil pastels that I saw elsewhere.
I followed up a link to the artist’s website and learned that he’s a trained architect. He doesn’t indicate his year of birth, but the year of graduation (Bachelor of Architecture, 1992) so he might be born in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
Most of Niebuhr’s works presented on the site are abstract and very pure, reduced to only very few elements. The visitor of his website is welcomed with one of the recent works, also a mixed media painting of oil pastel and graphite on paper. I think these works have a haptic quality to them which is difficult to capture on a computer screen. When looking at these pictures, I imagine the material contrast between the powdery graphite and the creamy oil pastels. I’m finding this very inspirational.
I also discovered some line-based drawings among Niebuhr’s earlier works, like these triangular forms in the “Drawings VIII” subsection of the website. I analysed how they were drawn and thought that they were like rule-based experiments: The rule might go like this:
Draw strait lines from left to right, all starting in the same point of origin. Begin at an able of -25° and stop at an angle of +25°. Then continue at the opposite rim of the paper, drawing lines from right to left, using the intersection of the last line of the previous series with the paper rim as your point of origin and draw lines from + 205° to +165°. Continue until you reach the bottom of the paper.
Some refinements would be necessary at the beginning and the end of the instructions for the drawing, then it would work in a similar way as a computer program… having developed computer software myself, maybe this was why I was so fascinated by these drawings? But I felt immediately attracted by the visual effect, the analysis came later. The drawing is actually part of a series of drawings which seem to explore systematic variations of the base rules.
I see a relationship between the artists’s training as an architect and this kind of approach to making art. It also reminds me of the beauty that can be created by applying small rules to create large structure, a principle which is employed in creating nature-like structures using computer algorithms. Mandelbrot sets are one example of these, and there exist numerous variations of the Mandelbrot or similar formulae. The exciting thing with the Mandelbrot set visualization is that no matter how much the image is magnified, the same structures emerge again and again, as in this visualzation from the Wikipedia page on Mandelbrot sets.
I have even programmed a Mandelbrot visualization myself 10 years ago in 2002, after I had completed my training as a programmer. I developed a small computer program which could be embedded into a webpage. It would produce Mandelbrot visualizations in mostly black and green tones, and a magnification when the user clicked inside the image. Unfortunately I don’t remember where this material is. I haven’t used it for a long time and it’s possible that I cannot access it anymore. But I’ll post an amendment to this article if I can locate it.
Back to Matt Niebuhr, I discovered in the “Drawings IV” subsection of his website these graphic drawings and was amazed when I realized that they were indeed “rule-based” drawings! The artist has added the instructions on the detail page of the drawing:
Instructions: Make four, 4’ x 4’ squares and within each square, make 4” straight hand drawn lines. For each square, use one of four colors: black, red, yellow and blue, one color in each square. Make the lines in each square for 4 hours and for 4 consecutive days.
I can’t help finding it weird to instruct somebody to draw short lines on four consecutive days, even more weird if someone indeed follows these instructions… but the drawing has something to it. I especially like all the irregularities of colour and shape of the lines in the apparently strict and inflexible rule-based pattern.
On the artist’s blog, there are some more mixed media works employing oil pastel, for example these two where oil pastels are combined with acrylic colour. I’m fascinated by these works because they really stretch my idea of what can be done with oil pastels.
Post scriptum: I found my Mandelbrot program
The Mandelbrot program was part of the backup of a website I had set up in 2002 to present some of my multimedia computer art work. I’m not sure about the mathematical properties of the formula I employed, but I remember how fascinated I was seeing this program in action. Here are some screenshots I took at the time.
References
Matt Niebuhr 2011, Untitled (red / black), oil pastel and graphite on paper
http://mattniebuhrdrawings.tumblr.com/post/13546337143/untitled-red-black-2011-11-15-oil-pastel
Matt Niebuhr 2012 Untitled (shimmer), oil pastel and graphite on paper
http://www.mattniebuhr.com/Matt_Niebuhr/Matt_Niebuhr_-_Drawings_IX_Equal_Enlarged.html
Matt Niebuhr 2011 Untitled (line studies – 8 diagonals), graphite on paper
http://www.mattniebuhr.com/Matt_Niebuhr/Matt_Niebuhr_-_Drawings_VIII__Lines_y_diagonal_Enlarged__5.html
Wikipedia: Mandelbrot set
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
Matt Niebuhr 2010 Untitled (black 4” hand drawn straight lines in a 48” square), black coloured pencil on paper
http://www.mattniebuhr.com/Matt_Niebuhr/Matt_Niebuhr_-_Drawings_IV_black_01.html
Matt Niebuhr 2012, Untitled drawing (Murder in the red barn), oil pastel and acrylic on paper
http://mattniebuhrdrawings.tumblr.com/post/27832465402/untitled-murder-in-the-red-barn-2012-07-21-oil
Matt Niebuhr 2012 Untitled, oil pastel and acrylic on paper
http://mattniebuhrdrawings.tumblr.com/post/27905286572/untitled-2012-07-21-oil-pastel-and-acrylic-on
Matt Niebuhr Website
http://www.mattniebuhr.com/Matt_Niebuhr/Matt_Niebuhr_-_Works.html
Matt Niebuhr Blog
http://mattniebuhrdrawings.tumblr.com/