Making a generative recreation of Paul Klee Highways and Byways Poster
Context
As part of the module DE 232 at IDC, IIT Bombay taught by Rasagy, I learnt a lot about design through programming and coding, via a web browser based application called “P5JS”. It was quite fun to work on different artistic projects in a completely new medium
Our final assignment was to recreate an abstract painting in p5.js, and then make an interactive version by applying what we learnt in the week.
About Paul Klee
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
About the artwork
This is the most important painting to come out of Paul Klee’s trip to Egypt, from mid-December, 1929, to early January, 1930. He visited Luxor, Karnak, Thebes, Aswan, and Cairo. The journey was nearly as great an experience as the earlier one to Tunisia.
For me, this painting presented quite a challenge, which is why I chose this as my project. It gave me an opportunity of trying out functions with randomness in them.
About my recreation
In my recreation, I focused on:
- Generating random blocks of rectangles to create abstract paintings
- Randomly create lines and curves to play as background
- Adding more variation and randomness to the final product to make it visually unique but representative of the original
Final result
