I am not sure whether I am a painter or a print maker. That’s because my paintings are painted by my robot, Zanelle. A picture of her painting my portrait is to the left, under the portrait. A video of Zanelle painting can be seen in my website at www.zanelle.com. The paintings are reproducible, however, as can be seen in the photos below, they never come out the same due to a number of variables.
These four pictures show the input into my robot (the first picture), and three renditions made from that input (the next three). The painting is called The Resurrection. (14×18 inch Acrylic on Canvas). The three versions are in shown in the order in which they were painted. Each took about 16 hours to paint. The robot painted them with a traditional artist’s brush.
Using lessons learned with each painting, I improved the algorithms, brush pressure, paint, and a variety of other variable before making the next. Opposite printmaking where the first prints are the artist’s proof, I would consider the final painting to be the definitive sample. It basically took several renditions to perfect.
I am curious what people think about where this method of creating paintings falls – Is it painting or printmaking. It is definitely somewhere in between, but which of the two is it more of? Hope to hear from you…
Pindar
It is one of my brush stroke planning algorithm. Once the robot and I have arrived at a design, this algorithm plots out and plans exactly how the brush will fill in the canvas, stroke by stroke. I have a dozen or so of these programs that each have a different effect. This specific program paints in a style that resembles an old school dot matrix printer. It paints only horizontal lines. Examples of other programs that plot brush strokes include random fills, cross hatching, and contour painting. I will show examples of a simple cross hatching effect in my next post. Zanelle is painting this same composition with a cross hatching algorithm as I write this.
