Roman Verostko is an artist who produces algorithmic art. Verostko developed his own software to control a line plotter that produces unique pen and ink drawings. He also modified the plotter to hold an oriental paintbrush. In 1995, he co-founded the Algorists with Jean-Pierre Hébert.[1]
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Roman Verostko was born in 1929 in Tarrs, Pennsylvania, a coal-mining town fifty miles east of Pittsburgh.[2] A painter in his early life, he also studied as a Benedictine monk at Saint Vincent Seminary in Latrobe, Pa 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 redirected his artistic practices toward algorithmic art. He now resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is a Professor Emeritus at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
After graduating from high school, Verostko studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where he received a diploma in illustration in 1949. He then began at Saint Vincent’s Seminary in 1953, earning a BA in Philosophy in 1955. While Verostko retained his ties to Saint Vincent, he pursued graduate work at other institutions in the early 1960s, first in an MFA program at Pratt Institute in 1961, then studying art history at New York University and Columbia from 1961 to 1962. Verostko then travelled to Paris, where he studied printmaking at Hayter's Atelier 17 from 1962 to 1963, as well as took courses at the 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".[3] 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 forebearers of the Algorists, among them Le Corbusier.[4] Many of the themes Verostko would explore in his life's work - EXAMPLES - emerged in this time period in and around Paris.
During the 1980s, Verostko developed an interactive computer program called the Magic Hand of Chance. He went on to create his Hodos software, which controls a pen plotter that can also hold an oriental brush. Examples of his algorithmic work produced on a plotter include the Pathway series, the Pearl Park Scriptures, the Diamond Lake Apocalypse and the Manchester Illuminated Universal Turing Machine, produced in honor of Alan Turing.
In 1990, Verostko published an artist's book in honor of George Boole, in a limited edition.[5] Each copy of the book contains unique multi-pen plotter drawings, plus a single brush stroke created using the same algorithm.
In 2008, Verostko installed an "upsidedown" mural, with 11 units spanning two stories inside the main entrance of the Fred Rogers Center located on the Saint Vincent College campus, Latrobe, PA. The images are digital transformations of his original pen and ink drawings created for an "Upsidedown Book" in the 1970s. His "Upsidedown Book" was published and dedicated to Fred Rogers on August 2, 2008.[6]
His work is held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, Saint Vincent College and other institutions.
Links to other Algorists