About

Jason Strachan is a South African-born artist and coder based in Melbourne, Australia. His practice sits at the intersection of drawing, code, and digital image-making, with a background in graphic design and software. Growing up in South Africa shaped how he sees colour, pattern, and texture, and left him with a lasting interest in memory and repetition, qualities that remain present in the work even when an image is abstract or driven entirely by rules.

Strachan makes digital art using custom-built software, drawing on historical digital techniques such as dithering and color cycling. In color cycling, values within an image's palette rotate so that a static picture appears to move. His work has been exhibited in galleries in Melbourne and Cape Town.

My work starts as drawing and rarely stays still. Colours shift, sections repeat, and patterns break and are repaired. Pattern and repetition become forms of memory: structures recur, shift, and carry traces of what came before. The artwork keeps changing long after I've stepped away; it behaves less like a picture and more like a small system with rules of its own.

The tools are part of the work. I build them myself, bringing the editor, the code, and the hand together as one continuous process. I want to see the flat image start to breathe: to bring the hand into contact with a hard, rule-based system. Pressure, hesitation, and mistakes pile up on the digital canvas, pushing against the programmatic nature of code.

Sketching comes first, even as a digital artist, because it's quick and forgiving. It's a place to be wrong before anything settles. It lets me find the structure and rhythm of the piece; I'm not solving anything yet, just listening for what it's trying to become.

Before I touch code or build one of my systems, I look for the intention beneath the mark-making. That intention becomes clearer as I move between drawing, building, and looking.

Then I build the tools I pair with each project: algorithms, textures, and brushes. I write my own software because I want the processes these systems make possible to shape the work, rather than simply produce an output. A drawing system might become a playback system, a generative piece, or a texture for another artwork. These tools decide what the image can actually do beyond the still frame.

By the end, I'm still asking the same question I started with: does the process serve the artwork's intention?