Itten

Homage to Johannes Itten a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer, and theorist associated with the Bauhaus. A pioneer of color theory and major influence of Op artists and other expressionist painters in his day.

Itten's idea of the color wheel is embodied in the HSL color model where a hue can be located on a circle (red at the 0-degree mark, green at the 120-degree mark, blue at the 240-degree mark and back around to red at 360 degrees or 0). So a hue is a number between 0 and 360), saturation (a number between 0 and 100), and lightness (a number between 0 and 100). In this work a color space is defined by four random HSL colors placed at the corners of the picture frame. Then, given any point in the picture plane, a unique color can be calculated using a bilinear interpolation scheme. This way a unique hue can be determined relative to the corners of the space frame, relative to a set of four random colors. For a little variety I vary saturation for each iteration of an image between 75 and 100. I set lightness at a constant value of 50.

The tiles are formed by using another idea from the Bauhaus that I call fractions of the whole. I divide the X and Y axes into several non-uniform increments based on a number of random integers and project their spacing into the picture frame to create a tessellation of uniquely shaped tiles. A color calculation is made for each tile is based on the center of the tile in the color space and filled with that color.

Experience images of pure color based on a couple of Bauhaus ideas. Enjoy.

Please visit http://www.drbillkolomyjec.com