Flower plateau, 29th of June 2012
PovRay and computer graphics in general are painter's tool. I hope that I managed to illustrate this point in the past three years on the
pages of Construction of reality, at least to some extent.
A more literal "proof" of the statement can be found in the PovRay interpretations of famous paintings. As examples, I mention here
>> Twins with pearl earrings by Rene Bui (2005) and
>> Capriccio by Gene Obukhov, Ib Rasmussen,
Jim Charter, Txemi Jendrix, Peter Hertel, Matti Karnaattu, Bob Hughes and Christoph Hormann (2003). These examples are
PovRay variants of >> Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes
Vermeer and >> Capriccio:
St Paul's and a Venetian Canal, by >> William Marlow.
This post contains something similar. I was much less literal from Bui and Obukhov et al. when I interpreted the painting
Flower plateau by Bosnian-Herzegovian painter Gabrijel Jurkić. Unfortunately, this image is almost impossible to find on the
web in a decent version, and I cannot offer my photo of the painting because I never visited the Franciscan monastery in Livno where
the painting is kept. You can somewhat "sense" the painting on a variant that I tried to digitally "clean up" as far as I could (below).
Jurkić was an important painter of the region, probably less known and celebrated than he should have been. As far as I know his work, I can
say that his quality varies. Flower plateau is certainly one of his masterpieces. It is almost an abstract painting which shines with
impressionist character (above).
What is the essence of Jurkić's painting? We will receive different answers to this question, depending on who we ask. Here is an
apparently trivial answer to the question: The essence of Jurkić's painting is dense covering of the surface with shapes. The surface
is of course the plateau, and the shapes are the flowers of different colors. Most of artists, art critics and historians of art will be
utterly unsatisfied with such an answer, but for a mathematician / physicist, this answer gives the recipe for reconstruction of
Jurkić's idea.
Additional elements of the recipe can be summarized as:
- the repeating shapes are similar to disks with a colored cores (flowers).
- the shapes are almost parallel with the surface, they are separated from it by a distance comparable to the disk diameter, and they are rotated randomly around x,y and z axes with the angles in intervals x:<-12,12>, y:<0,360>, z:<-17,17> (y axis points up).
- the shapes have different colors, depending on their position in the surface.
And that's more or less it. One should only add some mountains behind the plateau.
The reason for which we like the painting cannot be "read" directly from the recipe. We, similarly, can only partially read the reasons
for which we like some meal from the recipe for its preparation. I leave it to you to decide for yourself whether you like Jurkić's
painting and why. I will continue with "trivialities" and "recipes".
PovRay interpretation of Jurkić's painting contains 1350000 flowers. I think that PovRay (and my laptop) could manage even more shapes, but there
was no need for that. Each flower is a union of two cylinders: one of them represents the colored core of the flower, and the other
the flower petals (below). The scene thus contains 2700000 cylinders, triangular mesh of the mountain and the plateau (mesh object) and
sky sphere ("real", hollow sphere of huge radius colored in sky colors).
In positioning the flowers, I did not take any care of their collision, which can be seen on the detail shown in the image above.
The advantage of the recipes is that, once they are understood, new quality can be obtained with small changes of the ingredients. Jurkić
would have had to paint a new painting, I just need to change the seed of the random number generator.
Two, just a little bit different variants of the recipe are shown on the images above and below.
This post will be the last one in this summer.
I don't know whether in autumn I will be able to continue publishing in the tempo of the last year. In case I don't make it, I
reorganized the >> Archived worlds in categories:
- Haiku illustration (6 posts)
- Comic (16 posts)
- SF and illustration (8 posts)
- Music and image (14 posts)
- Scientific illustration (44 posts)
- Kurt Vonnegut (8 posts)
- Raytracing and CG (32 posts)
- Non-digital image (20 posts)
| << Two angels in heaven | The Maker speaks >> |
Last updated on 29th of June 2012.