I created this piece upon studying "Water Lilies," painted in oil on canvas by Claude Monet in 1906. Only the second in the series, I challenged myself to make any given close-up a dynamic abstraction. On the macro, I wished to impress my own palette upon the landscape while maintaining the figure ground relationships that Monet created between lilies, water, and reflections of sky and treeline on top of the water.
Resolution: 15K x 14.5K // Approximate size on a 300 PPI retina screen: 1.27 meter x 1.22 meter or 4.16 feet x 4 feet. Made with Processing.org and Java. I visited, studied, sketched, made notes from, and and drew inspiration from photographed works at The Art Institute of Chicago. This research allowed me to create digitally rendered master copies after the works in Gallery 243, also known as The Monet Room. The master copy is a tradition in art in which a student artist creates a copy from a masterpiece in order to analyze and learn from the work. I create master copies in order to train myself to use the custom graphics software I've programmed, in addition to spurring the building of tools especially to meet the challenge of creating analogs to particular techniques. I've designed my software to leverage algorithms with my own human input. I build paintings layer by layer, making choices regarding color, shape, form, and how the algorithms I've written should interact at any particular time. The result is my ability to communicate in color and pattern in ways I long understood but which are too complex, time consuming, or cost prohibitive for my hand and materials to manifest physically with traditional methods.
Total unique vector shapes: 1,243,070.
verticies: 2,056,112.
ellipses: 509,426.
quad: 10,585.
rectangles: 44,711.
triangle: 16.
beziers: 15,605.
line: 662,727.
colors used: 309.
layers: 118.
