“Nocturne”

(24” x 47”) 12,569 brush strokes, 2006

Turner, Whistler, Monet The inspiration for this painting came from the book “Turner, Whistler, Monet” and their respective nocturnes, plus a desire to create a representational painting, a new direction for Dulcinea.

No Photographs Because Paul Kirby’s interest with Dulcinea is the use of brushstrokes and the spontaneity and surprise that come from AI programming, she would never be permitted to reproduce a scanned photograph. So, Paul explored what kind of traditional landscape Dulcinea could create that would be an evolution from Turner’s and Whistler’s nocturnes. 

All This Math Each element of the painting (waves, mountains, sky, and clouds) was mathematically created with a three-dimensional wire-mesh in a virtual world.  The wire mesh was created using fractional Brownian motion (fBm), as was discussed in the “Yellow Pointillism” painting. 

Paul wrote a 3-D graphics pipeline in Lisp, which allowed for transporting each element (such as water) from model-space, through world-space, camera-space and display-space to eventually robot-space.  

He calculated the lighting and reflections with Lambert’s Law of light behavior. Finally, he removed rear-facing and obstructed surfaces.  

A light source from behind the viewer’s left shoulder suggests the viewer is peering from the light into the dark to recreate the emotive effect of Whistler. 

Reflection Upon the Water – A Fusioneering Surprise! When he ran the simulation program the first time, he was expecting to see an orange reflection running all the way down the front of the painting.  However, with the reflection rules employed within the mathematical virtual world, no colored reflection can appear on the backside of a swell of water.  Thus, another nice fusioneering surprise!,