Initially my goal was to demonstrate that straight lines in a geometric sense could be used to show artistic beauty through rigorous placement of lines according to “formulae”. These formulaic placements of lines I called Formula Art, shortened later to Formulart. In this phase of my artistic journey, the focus of the work was to show how mathematically defined placement of lines could show the artistic viewer movement, beauty, and could even create images of organic objects. Most of the drawings during this period were based on a particular geometric figure and through placements of lines within the geometric figure, created an interesting image (see Gallery by Style, Formulart Styles). All the Formulart pieces during this period are hand drawn in black India ink on white paper. 

My 9th grade geometry teacher, Fr Joachim, started his class with the somewhat paraphrased statement above. When I started drawing, I felt that I could draw straight lines with the help of a ruler and since all things are made of straight lines (by Fr. Joachim’s definition) I should be able to draw anything. All that was necessary was to be able to find all the straight lines in the image I wanted to draw!  All lines can be defined by a formula that indicates its starting point and ending point or the starting point, length and the angle it is to take from the starting point. With these thoughts in mind, I began experimenting with drawings made up of straight lines.

In the early Formulart work, the formula was created first and then followed to discover what the resulting picture would look like. My goal, in order to make the drawings interesting, was to maximize the movement in the resulting pictures or to find organic figures (i.e. birds or butterflies, etc) in the drawings.

The bicycle drawings were an exception in the sense that I was challenged to draw a bicycle using Formulart. After studying bicycles, I determined that they were essentially made up of triangles. From there I determined how many triangles were required and how they would be filled in to create a bicycle image. Then the formula was written after the picture was created.