About Me


Self Portrait

 

I’m Alan Kaminsky. After earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering, I spent 17 years in industry doing software development at Bell Laboratories, Harris Corporation, and Xerox. I then spent 25 years teaching computer science as a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I retired from RIT in 2019, wondering about how I would spend my time.

Backing up a bit, in 2016 along with my family I visited Dia Beacon, a museum of contemporary art in Beacon, NY. There I was struck by an exhibit of artworks by Sol LeWitt, an artist I had not encountered before. LeWitt’s works emphasized regular arrays of simple patterns, drawn or painted by people following instructions LeWitt created. I said to myself, “I could make art like that.” But working as a full time faculty member left me no time to pursue the idea, and I put it on the back burner.

After retiring, I remembered that museum visit. Now I had time to pursue creating my own artworks.

 

I’m a digital printmaker. I create an artwork by writing a computer program that generates an image file, then I print the image on various media — usually on photo paper or art paper, but sometimes on canvas or cloth. I do mostly abstract art, occasionally foraying into quasi-representational art.

My art is inspired by:

Mathematics — Regular and irregular geometric shapes. Tilings that subdivide the whole artwork, or part of it, into overlapping or non-overlapping regions. Bézier curves. Graph colorings. Interpolation formulas. Cellular automata. Reflection symmetries. Steiner trees. Probability distributions. Random numbers.

Color — Back in the 60s and 70s I admired pop art’s simple designs, bold colors, and heavy outlines, exemplified by the works of artists like Peter Max and Heinz Edelmann, and the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine. I love infusing my art with color. With my “Colorscape” and “Inkblot” series of artworks, I also like to explore how colors can combine when shapes overlap, and how colors can morph from one hue to another across the artwork.

Artists — Sol LeWitt, for conceptual art. M. C. Escher, for art based on tilings. Mark Rothko, for art consisting of large, boldly colored shapes, as in my “Colorscape XXXVII” artwork. René Magritte, for contradictory art, as in my “Ceci N’est Pas” artworks. Andy Warhol, for art depicting everyday objects, as in my “Ceci N’est Pas II” artwork. Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, for pointillistic art, as in my “Inkblot” and “Colormist” series of artworks.

 

Please enjoy my web store. Check out my gallery, read the latest updates on my blog, browse the items I have for sale, view my shop policies, learn about commissioning unique artworks. Thanks for stopping by!