Victor Vasarely was an artist in the mid 1900s with some interesting ideas on language, geometry and design patterns. I first saw his work on permenant display in Palm Springs, then later the Vancouver Art Gallery hosted a special exhibit. I found it captivating.
Two works by Vasarely. Left: Zebras, 1965. Right: Zett-Kek, 1966, on display in Palm Springs
Much of his art is very geometric - he makes nice well-defined systems and then often perturbs them or adds some errors somehow. This a very programmatic approach to art, so I thought it would be fun to try to ‘implement’ some of his paintings in code. The Processing programming language is a Java library built specifically to make visual arts easy, so it was a good choice for this project.
Below are a few of my favourite Vasarely knock-offs, all computer-generated. The code to create them will be put up on github and linked here eventually; it’s on my to-do list.
Making this figure was a nice lesson in the Hue-Saturation-Value colour space
Processing supports polar coordinates, very handy for work like this
Simple but pretty
Vasarely used these atomic shapes quite a bit in his work
I always like how quickly the eye is drawn to things that break patterns
