Generative-Art on Max Halford

Morellet crosses with JavaScript

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The days I’m working on a deep learning project. I hate it but I promised myself to give it a real try. My scripts are taking a long time so I decided to do some procedural art while I waited. This time I’m going to reproduce the following crosses made by François Morellet. I saw them the last I went to the Musée Pompidou with some friends from university. I don’t have any smartphone anymore so one my friends was kind enough to take a few pictures for me, including this one. The painting is called Violet, bleu, vert, jaune, orange, rouge.

Stella triangles with JavaScript

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Around the same time last year I visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Frank Stella’s compositions really caught my eye. When I saw them I started thinking about how I could write a computer program to imitate his work. In this post I’m going to attempt to reproduce his so-called V Series.

Nice and simple right? Indeed in a lot of his work Frank Stella uses straight lines without much randomness. There are quite a few prints in the V Series. However in each one of them the common denominator is a single triangle. If we have a routine for drawing one triangle then we can use to make compositions. As always let’s start by creating a canvas.

Unknown pleasures with JavaScript

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

No this blog post is not about how nice JavaScript can be, instead it’s just another one of my attempts at reproducing modern art with procedural generation and the HTML5 <canvas> element. This time I randomly generated images resembling the cover of the album by Joy Division called “Unknown Pleasures”.

According to Wikipedia, this somewhat iconic album cover is based on radio waves. I saw a poster of it in a bar not long ago and decided to reproduce the next time I had some time to kill.

Grid paintings à la Mondrian with JavaScript

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Sat, 04 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I was at a laundrette today and had just finished my book so I had some time to kill. Naturally I devised an algorithm for generating drawings that would resemble the grid-like paintings that Piet Mondrian made famous. With the benefit of hindsight I guess I could indulge in saner activities while waiting for my laundry to dry!

I went through different ideas but in the end I settled on a recursive approach. My idea is to divide a rectangle into two smaller ones and then to do the same with each sub-rectangle. Every time a rectangle is generated and is then filled with a random color; like Mondrian I use yellow, red, blue, black and white.

Recursive polygons with JavaScript

maxhalford25@gmail.com (Max Halford) — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I like modern art, I enjoy looking at the stuff that was made at the beginning of the 20th century and thinking how it is still shaping today’s style. I’m not an expert, it’s just a hobby of mine. I especially like the Centre Pompidou in Paris, it’s got loads of fascinating stuff. While I was going through the galleries it struck me that some of the paintings were very geometrical. In fact they were so geometrical that a machine could have produced them! I’m not talking about artificial intelligence but rather a set of rules that could be given to a programming language. Through a series of blog posts I would like to try to emulate some works with my computer. I realize it’s a waste of time but it’s a good opportunity for me to learn some more JavaScript and refreshen my geometry. I also want to insist on making these drawings random, not deterministic.