About Me
My name is Devyn Caldwell and I am a Philadelphia-based generative artist and nascent creative coder who is creating art through the process of merging algorithms, automation, and randomness with drawing, handcraft, and rules. I use tools from the digital realm which are sent to the mechanical realm resulting in art in the physical realm.
After more than 30 years of working in various fields I left my career as a data-analyst to pursue my lifetime passion to create art. My experience in working with information and technology combined with my love of shapes, patterns, and design, eventually led me to discover my passion for the medium of generative art.
I am a self-taught artist (and new to learning code), but I’ve never been more impassioned about where my creative path is going before now.
Other influences include a love of architecture, history, industrial design, urban city-scapes, geometry, interiors, and shiny objects.
In addition to my art, I am restoring an 1850s Greek Revival rowhouse in South Philadelphia, one room at a time, with my spouse and our dog Bixby.
How I Found My Medium
I have been practicing various forms of creating art for most of my life, all the while working in the corporate world. I have dabbled in many different mediums including painting, stained glass, and woodcut print making. And while all of those forms of art-making have provided me with the joy of creating, none of them has fulfilled me enough to want to endlessly pursue them.
In early 2021 I fell in love with a modest piece of generative art created by artist Michelle Chandra using code to create the image and then plotting the image onto paper with a pen plotter. I immediately purchased the work for my spouse knowing it would always be on a wall in our house. When it arrived, I became even more deeply entranced by its beauty and began to Google my way into a whole new world of creative coding. I immediately experienced one of the biggest ‘Aha’ moments of my life.
I have always been drawn to abstract modernist art based on lines and patterns. After all… who doesn’t want to spend hours staring at a Sol LeWitt? It was through my work as a data-analyst, I discovered my strong skill-sets with working with data. Suddenly, it all made sense. Generative art is the perfect marriage of the technical and the creative. I am only in the beginning stages of learning how to code (I am blessed to have the help of a very talented software engineer close by), but I have never been more determined to learn the skills necessary to make this my reality.
My current work is mostly focused on creating digital harmonograms based on publicly available java script. As I dive deeper into coding, I look forward to finding much more of the weird and wonderful world of generative art.