Having actually drawn in charcoal recently, I was compelled to make a charcoal drawing simulation, and therefore to ask ... that question:
What is the signature of the artist when compared to the gesture of the machine?
And what is the motive of the machine — its inspiration, genius, instinct? What here is spontaneity? What is play? What does it mean to simulate a human practice, a human gesture, or for that matter the physics of movement? What grasping is this? What yearning? Where does one look here for authenticity? Will something like it be found?
The lines on these drawings though are deterministic, not spontaneous. The apparent randomness itself is deterministic—is pseudorandom. Is there gesture there? Is there anything? Anything behind what is simply there ...
Charcoal
Click on sketch to start a new drawing.
The software models a physical stick of charcoal — its length, its corners and broad sides, the way it tips and rolls as it moves — and a sheet of paper — with texture and tooth that catches pigment, and then can be erased or smudged. Each tool models a different kind of pigment manipulation mechanism: depositing, moving, and removing.
What pushes the stick is not a hand, but a set of undulating mathematically modeled forces: waves that drive it forward, twist it, resist it, make it tremble. The drawing is the trace of that struggle between force and friction.
The system composes the drawings, dividing the sheet into masses and voids, background and foreground, outlines, features. It does not see, but it places strokes into the bounded spaces and sends them on a trajectory by sensing the shape. It chooses among patterned styles of moving and marking as it goes.