D
ave Collier, student of lines and shapes based in Carlisle, north-west England. For many decades a computer programmer on systems for business and commerce, writing code in a range of different programming languages.
My interest is in the Science of Seeing: how the eye and brain identify colours and shapes, perception both practical and emotional.
Over many years I have been developing software for understanding visual perception and analysing and manipulating images.
Along this lonesome road to understanding, some images result that are interesting perceptually, or are attractive for various reasons in their own right. That, though, is incidental . . .
What I am not doing – have never attempted to do, is to make pretty pictures – pictures that someone might want to hang on their wall. It may be that someone does, and that is fine, but that is never the driver. Most important this! The goal is looking at what happens with the experiment.
An artist then, or a scientist? Or an amateur tinkering researcher? Happy with any of those monikers, The name is not the point, it’s the questioning that is the point, for me at any rate.
A little bit of history
I
n 1963 I went to St. Martin’s School of Art, to study Fine Art. At the end of the first year I was rejected for the diploma course. I grew up in relatively poor circumstances in north London and really had no idea how to follow the norms, with no one to advise me.
I was annoyed and disappointed at the time and felt that unreasonable, especially since most of the other students said they liked my work and were surprised that I, of all people, should be rejected. I applied to a number of art colleges and was rejected before or after interview by all of them.
Oh well, what to do? I went to work in a company that made specialist printing paper and gained my British Federation of Master Printers exams parts 1 and 2, and Paper Manufacture and Merchanting exams 1 and 2, too. Could have had a career in paper. A paper career.
But as these things happen I got talking to a man at a party who was recruiting for the newly-developing British computer industry. I liked the look of that and so drifted into becaming a computer programmer.
Always the best way, a friend of a friend. Always. If you can swing it.
Serendipity
W
hoda known it? One door closes and a better one opens. I have never lost my interest in art, especially the psychology of art, and these closing and opening doors happened to have aided that rather than hindering it, though of course you do what you do, you can never know what would have happened had you done something different.
Not Just a Coder
I
never got a first degree but did a Masters in my early 40’s, in an area of psychology. Have pondered doing a PhD from time-to-time but have not been able to find a university that really covers my subject area, spanning art, psychology and visual perception from a scientific research perspective. And anyway, I have planty to do off my own bat.
It hasn’t all been coding. I have been a company director of a staff agency, I have owned and run a hotel and restaurant, and I have been the proprietor of a publishing business, among other things, though all along my real interest has been in the lines and shapes.
These web pages show some of the results of my experiments with photo-processing, together with some digital drawings, which I choose to do in a somewhat scribbly style, for the perception of scenes and feelings with limited conventional clues.
