Senior Project

Project Statement

Learning to Paint is about having fun and creating a new process for a traditional artform. It is personal to me, it is my attempt, my process of learning how to paint in an unconventional way. I am deliberate in ignoring traditional advice despite a nearly 50,000 year old history. Brushes, canvas, and pigments are replaced with digital monitors, plotters, and JavaScript. I’ve created an algorithm to generate patterns inspired by the early digital works of Vera Molnar, Eduardo Kac, and Hiroshi Kawano, to name a few, and their predecessors who created similar systems with pixels and grids like Piet Mondrian and Gerhard Richter.

Motivation

I had this idea about a year ago that I would learn to paint, but I am too lazy to buy brushes, oil, and canvas, and I certainly don’t have the dexterity or patience to actually go through with actually learning. But I wanted to learn, so I created my own process and ignored traditional advice. To paint daily and with as little effort as possible, I decided that I would paint a pixel a day, starting at a low pixel count and gradually working my way up to greater and greater detail.

Although “a pixel a day” was discontinued only two weeks after starting, I hope to breathe new life into the process in anticipation of my senior thesis. I am now at a stage of laziness where I have adapted an algorithm to make interesting-looking paintings for me.

Context Review

My nearest neighbors appear to be NFT artists like Rafaël Rozendaal. It might be natural to make this project an NFT thing, but I’m not particularly interested in any sort of marketing or monetization of my project, nor am I very fond of the NFT space. I want to regress a little bit and mimic digital artists in early computer technologies. [See Arreola-Burns, Pita, et al. Digital Art : 1960s - Now.]