The Likeness of a Flower

And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.

• T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: Burnt Norton (1936)

This work is an attempt to encapsulate in an algorithm, not the likeness of a flower, but the likeness of a painting of a flower. If, according to a very old definition, art is an imitation of nature, this is an imitation of an imitation – a sort of meta-imitation of nature by means of computer code.

The challenge for this piece was to capture some of the looseness and fluidity of the human hand when holding a brush or a pencil, and reproducing some typical forms of hand-made scribbles, doodles and brush strokes. However, absent the materiality of paint and canvas, everything is simulated here on the base of a very simple resource: circles. Everything you see is built of very many overlapping circles of varying sizes, colors and opacities. It is circles all the way down…

Inspiration for this work comes from a number of expressionist painters, from 20th century classics like Cy Twombly, to the magnificent contemporary work of Philip Maltman: https://www.instagram.com/philipmaltman/

This work is animated.
Controls:
[SPACE] to play/pause
[r] to restart the drawing
[f] to toggle fullscreen
[s] to download capture
[2] to [9] to generate and save a hi-res image at multiples of the original 1000 x 1000 resolution. Please note that rendering at high resolutions can be slow.

Made with the open-source libraries p5.js and chroma.js