Examples of Noll's Teenager Drawings

Notes

Self-published PDF on A. Michael Noll's own website, noll.uscannenberg.org/TeenDrawings.pdf, posted alongside his Computer Art pages. Three leaves carrying scans of five drawings with a heading, one line of introduction and three short captions. No publisher, imprint, copyright line or date of posting appears on the sheet.. Self-archived by the author at http://noll.uscannenberg.org/TeenDrawings.pdf — Noll posts his own papers on his site at noll.uscannenberg.org, which is where this copy comes from. Hosting here is with his agreement, given to Bre Pettis directly on 6 October 2026. Image-only scan: render the pages to describe them. A three-page sheet of five scanned drawings headed “EXAMPLES OF NOLL'S TEENAGER DRAWINGS”, with a single line of introduction saying they were drawn in 1952 and 1953, when he was an early teenager, and three brief captions. Noll was born in 1939, so he was about thirteen or fourteen. Nothing here is computer art and the sheet makes no claim about computers; it is a piece of self-curated biography, posted as evidence for the statement he makes in his 1994 Leonardo memoir that as a child he had an interest in drawing and made elaborate pictures of the interiors of ships and space vehicles. The largest, hand-titled and signed, is a wide cutaway elevation in coloured pencil and ink: green structural beams, blue water tanks above, decks of corridors with pendant lamps, an escalator, machinery, a red locomotive and dozens of tiny stick-figure people; a CONFIDENTIAL stamp shows through in mirror image from the back of the sheet. Noll's caption calls it an Atomic Furnace. A second, headed DEPTH in green capitals, is a symmetrical diagram of a blue double cone above a red cone opening into a green box. A third, signed at lower right, shows a cross-braced frame above a waterline with red figures climbing arcs to a seabed. The fourth, captioned some sort of submarine and stamped NOV 7 1952, is a cutaway of a submarine on a blue sea, with periscope raised, a crowded bridge, bunks, crew and engines. The last, on lined paper, is a poster: a grey rocket, a pink Mars, a magenta comet, and the words “Visit Cool Mars” in a constructed display face that Noll calls an art deco design with its own font. For a computer-art library the interest is that the cutaways already show the habits the computer work would depend on: plan-and-elevation thinking, perspective construction, the systematic repetition of small drawn elements, and above all the stick figure, which returns ten years later as the body plan of the 1965 computer-generated ballet - a single line for the body, a single-line shoulder and single-line arms moving on a stage. The Visit Cool Mars sheet shows an early appetite for constructed lettering, which also returns in the four-dimensional letter animation of 1967-68. Points of record: The sheet states that the drawings were made in 1952 and 1953, when Noll was an early teenager; Five drawings: an Atomic Furnace cutaway, a diagram headed DEPTH, an above-and-below-water structure with climbing figures, a submarine cutaway, and a Visit Cool Mars poster; Two drawings are signed A. Michael Noll; the submarine carries a NOV 7 1952 date stamp; Not computer art: coloured pencil and ink on paper, posted by Noll as pre-computer background to his computer art pages; The stick figures in the Atomic Furnace drawing prefigure the stick figures of his 1965 computer-generated ballet. Illustrated: Atomic Furnace - Side-cut View (hand-titled, signed A. Michael Noll): wide colour cutaway elevation of a multi-level installation with water tanks, decks, an escalator, machinery, a locomotive and many stick-figure people; DEPTH: symmetrical frontal diagram with a blue double cone in a tall rectangle above a red cone opening into a green box, with orange and green guide lines; Untitled and uncaptioned: a cross-braced frame above a waterline, with red figures climbing green and blue arcs down to a brown seabed; signed at lower right; “Some sort of submarine”: long cutaway of a submarine on a blue sea with periscope and radio mast, crowded bridge, bunks, crew, engines and a purple screw; date stamp NOV 7 1952; “Visit Cool Mars”: poster on lined paper with a grey rocket, a pink Mars, a magenta comet with a gold star, and hand-constructed display lettering. People named: A. Michael Noll - sole author and subject; the heading refers to him in the third person while the introduction is in the first person, No other person is named on the sheet. Noted: The supplied citation gives no year. The sheet says the drawings were made in 1952 and 1953 and one bears a NOV 7 1952 stamp, so 1952 is recorded here as the earliest year; 1953 is equally attested. Only the first drawing carries a title in the artist's hand. It reads “Atomic Furnace - Side-cut View”, but the initial F is formed like an S, so the word could be read as “Surnace” or “Surface”; Noll's own caption calls it an Atomic Furnace. The second and third drawings carry no caption on the sheet; the descriptions given here are mine, from the page images. A stamped CONFIDENTIAL and a partial date reading roughly “APR 12 19..” show through in mirror image from the reverse of the first sheet; the sheet does not explain what was stamped or why. The signature on the third drawing is small and could not be read with certainty; it appears to be the same A. Michael Noll signature. No publisher, date of posting or copyright line appears anywhere in the PDF, and the drawings are undated individually apart from the submarine's stamp.