John W Snow

This portrait of Lee Krasner is based on a photo of Krasner taken by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders in 1980. I used a Sobel filter to calculate the gradient of a portion of the photograph and then constructed a vector field normal to the gradient field. Each stroke in the "painting" begins with a point randomly selected in the image based on the magnitude of the gradient. Euler integration is then used to create a path through the normal vector field beginning at the chosen point. The final stroke consists of a collection of bicubic splines which loosely follow the calculated path using colors near to the color at the selected point.

This piece is inspired by Krasner's "Composition" from 1949. First, a recursive algorithm was used to partition the digital canvas into a collection of rectangles, and each rectangle was filled with a nested sequence of rectangles or ellipses. The resulting image was used as a seed image for the final piece. I used a Sobel filter to calculate the gradient of the seed image and constructed a vector field normal to the gradient field. "Strands" of pixels whose colors were selected from "Composition" were then dropped into the normal field and allowed to flow through the field until they settled into the final positions seen here.