William Morris and nature-based recursive art

Morris Tulip and Willow design from Wikipedia

William Morris was one of the leaders of the Arts and Craft Movement that was at its height at the end of the 18th century into the 20th century. It was a reaction to the industrialisation of design, with machine processes having taken over from human artists and designers. Those behind the Arts and Craft Movement thought there was a clear drop in the quality of design from that possible of human artists. There are, of course, clear parallels to the current emergence of AI-generated art. Will it lead to an equivalent movement putting human creativity back at the core of art and design?

William Morris’ art is full of floral designs with twisting, branching stems, leaves and flowers, but built around geometric patterns. Plants often have a naturally recursive structure with for example, stems branching off self-similar stems, which branch off new-self similar stems. Trees, roots, grasses, ferns all have this kind of structure. This observation has led to algorithms for generating aspects of the natural world recursively. By including randomness each run of the algorithm generates a novel version of the same thing. This allows an image of a whole forest to be generated where each tree is unique but uses the same algorithm.

Combining these two ideas we can generate William Morris inspired imagery using recursive “doodle” algorithms. They combine algorithms with design input from an artist (you). Different people following the algorithm to create a “doodle” end up with unique pictures but with some of the same feel. Create new algorithms to create new templates for different families of design.

What do you have to do?

You just follow the instructions, drawing lines and shapes as instructed. The instructions are recursive which means they refer to themselves over and over again to get the core self-similar part of the drawing done. Once finished you return back to the instruction that made the recursive call. There may be more instructions to follow on return.