Art and math collide

An intricate web of branching lines extends across six hinged panels like inky frost on a field of gold. The glowing panels evoke pine branches and sunlight, but the lines, colors and forms are anything but natural.

“Zen Maple” is part of a remarkable display of pioneering computer-generated art at Old Town’s MICA Gallery through Jan. 9.

The art was synthesized in the fertile mind of former Michigan State University Professor and state Department of Transportation research director Lawrence French Holbrook.

Holbrook died in 2002, but he left behind more than 100 files bursting with his unique fusion of mathematics and visual art. The show at MICA, curated by his family, brings about two dozen of them to life, printed and mounted with modern, high-quality equipment.

Visitors who expect to see mathematically precise arrays of pixels will be surprised by Holbrook’s dynamic and fluid images. “Homage to Georgia,” a nod to American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, surges and drifts like the edge of a cloud bank.

When Holbrook retired from public service in 1992, he dove head-first into his art. By then, his head was full of many things.

He taught philosophy at MSU and was director of the Materials and Technology Research Laboratory at the state Department of Transportation. He later advised the state’s attorney general on risk management and tort litigation. He avidly pursued many other interests, including modern architecture and art. He loved the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, Gustav Mahler and the Rolling Stones. He couldn’t be torn away from the color field masterpieces of Mark Rothko during a gallery visit in the 1990s.

In his mind, it was all connected.

Holbrook’s artistic process was complicated. In the MICA exhibit, a page of his handwritten notes is posted next to a colorful canvas called “Dude Descending Staircase, a play on Marcel Duchamp’s iconic 1912 canvas “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2.”

Each pixel, Holbrook wrote, is the result of a “number assignment.”

“The number itself may involve up to 750 calculation cycles,” he wrote. “Each cycle requires the completion of an algebraic mathematical algorithm, in this case, trigonometric.”

To put it another way, this is not off-the-shelf, programmed art but the unique fruit of one man’s fertile mind.

By creating natural-feeling images from mathematics, Holbrook was only turning the tables on nature. Look at the spiraling seeds of a sunflower and it’s clear that the natural world itself is largely a manifestation of mathematics.

Sara Clark, a friend of the artist’s family and passionate admirer of his work, said that Holbrook’s vision was deeper and more profound than a simple right brain-left brain hookup.

“Math is nothing but a way to describe a relationship between certain things,” she said. “He looked at it and was able to translate that into art, to take an equation and see it.”

The MICA exhibition sprang from a fleeting impulse. In 2022, about 20 years after her husband’s death, Holbrook’s widow, Elinor Holbrook, slipped into an empty conference room at the Community Mental Health Authority of Clinton, Eaton and Ingham Counties’ offices on Jolly Road in Lansing to see if one of her husband’s pieces was still there.

In the 1990s, Holbrook served on the authority’s board and worked with Clark to get the building built.  “Nobody recognized me,” Elinor Holbrook said.

“Zen Maple,” blown up to six enormous panels, each one taller than a person, was still there, in excellent condition. She snapped a photo with her phone and showed it to local artist Julian Van Dyke and MICA Gallery President Terry Terry at a MICA art exhibit.

They were impressed by the screens and urged her to put together an exhibit.

“You can’t tell if it was created then or now,” Van Dyke said. “Larry was on the leading edge of what we see today.”

Some of the images at the MICA show have been spectacularly “remastered,” to borrow a term from film and music, using equipment capable of much higher resolution. Most of them are printed and mounted on higher quality metal, canvas and paper than Holbrook was able to use 20 or more years ago.

Some works, including a painterly, rainbow-hued canvas called “Fabric,” have never been printed before.

In their new lives, printed on canvas and metal, “Fabric” and another Holbrook image, “Detroit City,” explode with vivid colors.

“He was of a generation where you were either a doctor or an engineer, and he chose to be an engineer,” Elinor Holbrook said. “But he wanted to be a painter.”

The unique visual universe of “Math Meets Art” is the fruit of a happy ending. In retirement, he found a way to do both.