The painting robot called Vangobot is simply awesome. It is the rare breed of art creating robot that actually leaves behind an aesthetically pleasing piece of art. Most robots make abstract art or are performance pieces.

This is of course a self serving statement as I have made a similar robot, but just take a look at this one compared to mine. What I found most interesting is that while both myself and the artist/programming team made this with the same sort of approach, our robots are different in a number of ways, least of which stylistically. Their robot paints with multiple brushes and smoothly mixes colors with one another. Even though we share a basic approach our robots have their own style.

Vangobot makes what look to be impressionistic paintings. Smooth flowing strokes compared to my harsh and rigid straight lines. While I can do curves, I like the cross-hatching effect of mine. Similarly while Vangobot can probably do straight lines, it prefers algorithms that swirl paints onto the canvas.

What will be interesting as more and more artists realize how cool painting robots can be is to see all the styles that pop out of them. Unlike what I expect the public would think is going to happen, I bet each robot is as unique and different from one another as Vangobot is from my painting robot.

Almost like a personality.

If you have purchased one of mine, I highly suggest you get something from these guys and start a modern painting robot art collection. I guarantee you there will be many more entries into this genre in the coming years…

Pindar

Not sure why I chose to do a painting of Jesus with my painting robot. I have been doing a lot of portraits recently, and his face just came to mind. I love how there was a Shroud of Turin like quality to the painting as it was being made. The video above compresses about 12 hours of my robot painting into 20 seconds. You can watch the image of his face as it began to appear on the canvas. At points it is just a phantom image, until finally the face becomes clearer and clearer. I am regularly recording the entire painting process with a camera suspended right above the paint brush. I plan on including the movies with the painting on any purchase.

Speaking of which this painting is for sale here…

Warhol Picasso and Robot (58"x18")

Big claim of course, and probably not true. Well the part where it was painted by my robot is true.

I took an image of Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” and fed it into my robots algorithms. It then came up with the painting you see above. Cool thing about when my robot paints though is that it then is able to repaint the image in a similar manner. This was done to make the three canvas triptych. If you look at each image, you will see slight differences. It is sort of a print, but unique. A close up of one of the three canvases can be seen below.

Like all my work with the robot, this is for sale to support further robotic art development. You can also click here to see other robot generated paintings.

This video is of my art robot painting one of nine similar paintings with a brush on canvas. So it isn’t too boring it plays at 64x speed. I just wanted to get some opinions on whether people considered this artwork, and art made in a similar manner, to be a painting or a print?

Click here to see more videos of my painting art robot.

You have to love this insane invention. It is a robot that drives around with a big paint brush making random marks as it goes. As far as I am concerned this is pretty sophisticated generative art. I am curious what algorithms decide the speed that it should drive around at. I am also curious if it is limited to just paint in just one color at a time. If that is the case then there are a lot of decisions being made by the artist operator. Will look more into this and see if there is any information on how random these random strokes are, if they are random at all…

Follow this link if you are looking for info on my painting art robot.

Otherwise let me tell you about my first experience with robotic art.  In college a popular performance art piece was put on by Survival Research Labs.  The image below is of RABOT, one if the “labs” robots.

SRL Robot

As can be seen, this is not the typical robot.  In fac,t this is basically a rabbit corpse hooked into a machine.  Most of SRL’s robots were similar.  They were not robots in the sense that they operated autonomously, but instead were mostly radio controlled mechanical monsters that would move around and do various cool things for an audience, often in a hazardous manner.

I remember seeing a video of one particularly dangerous performance where a fire belching robot started shooting staples into the crowd.  Pleased crowd members were interviewed after the performance where one showed the staple that had hit him.  It was his souvenir of the performance.  Awesome stuff.

Whenever I feel like I am getting boring talking about robot art, I will look up something insane from these guys and fill you in on it.

Above is my most recent painting.  A pop art portrait of Jelly Roll Morton as a Teenager.  It is a large piece (62″x52″).  It is currently for sale on ebay and comes with free framing if you are interested.

You can see it for sale here: Jelly Roll Morton as a Teenager

Washington National Cathedral, 50″x41″, 2009

You can purchase this painting, or even commission a painting of a location that you would like to have by visiting my ebay store at my online store. I also have about 60 other paintings for sale there.

A direct link to this painting is at…

Washington National Cathedral Painting

Pindar

An interesting recent improvement is a live feed of what the robot is painting at this very instant. Below is a sample of the live image. It is created by collaging photos taken from the robotic head every dozen or so brush strokes.

The top left image is the painting that it is working to complete. The window to the right is a birds eye view of the painting (the collage). And the text on the left are some stats on its progress. This image was taken when the robot had finsihed only 7% of the painting. If you want to see a more complete image, or just want to check out the most recent live photo, go to my homepage at www.vanarman.com.

I accept commissions and if you want to see the painting you purchase being painted, I can even arrange to tell you when the robot will be painting it. I also save a video of all the files so you will even be able to see the art work get painted step by step. Just drop me an email at pindar@pindar.org. You can also visit my store at http://stores.ebay.com/studiovanarman.

Pindar

Kenny is a 44″x35″ (9 framed canvas 14″x11″ canvases) robot painting that I have been working on for the past week.  I am doing more and more portraits these days.  Also, I am doing larger and larger scale work.  This painting took my robot 4 days to paint.  Keeping the paint wet was the challenge.  If you are interested in a large scale modern portrait, drop me an email at pindar@pindar.org.

Pindar