A Painter a Poet (APAP) is an exploration of past works and a further look into how generative text and image can tie together. Unlike past work in APAP the text and image outputs are unique and split, two sides of a weighted coin. 10% of outputs are poems and the rest are abstract paintings. Every generative project from my earliest HEN work to now has always struggled with how generative text and image can go together. I've often wondered if leaving the text from my artwork would have made them more palatable, if the text threw off potential collectors. At the same time the generative poetry and prose is the work I most enjoy and find that it consistently surprises me the most.

I was also influenced by a section in Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go where the main character describes as children them putting their art work out on display and the children could trade for pieces. The main character remarks that there were paintings and poems and she now couldn't understand why the poems were also seen of equal value. That section always stuck with me...

Early generative Hen work exploring text:

• Copy-copy #0
• This is How the World Ends
• The Place Up Lake with the Indian Name

A Painter

A Painter came about from playing with a poison disc algorithm and color layering. It was an attempt to create an output that blended together, where each ink layer was placed on top of each other. The same effect of traditional relief or screen printing. Here is what an early prototype looked like where you can see very nice blending:

After starting to adjust the packing and color blends the next step was to start to pull in shapes and colors from past work. Notably some of the basic shapes of "Breakthrough Moment" and "Artbox".

Eventually that lead to several shape choices the algo could take: artbox, pill, castle, dimo, pinball, matisse, and portal.

Artbox

Pill

Castle

Dimo

Pinball

Matisse

Portal

Besides the pattern which is the obvious definer there is additional customizations of mood which chooses the color profile (bright, dark, natural), the color scheme itself based on the mood, the size and packing, the overlay which are the lines laid on top of the patterns at the end of animation, and the color mod which determines how colors blend with each other when they are overlapped, do they lighten, darken, burn, or cover. All of these, and other untracked traits, create a wide array of outputs from the algo:

A Poet

A Poet is a generative poem, 10% of the outputs. Composition heavily influenced by Alison Knowles "A House of Dust". Please for the love of all that is good go look at her work here. Of course the need to generate multiple possible poems led to a slightly different approach then the endless looping that Knowles follows. In my poem 10 stanzas would be generated based on a series of unique lines all aligning to a mood (bright, dark, natural). The end result was not meant to be a fully functioning poem but to create a series of abstract stanzas that conveyed a mood. Here is what a bunched early output looked like:

As I explored it became clear that I was less and less interested in generating an entire poem of great worth but within the full poem an occasional truly beautiful set of lines would emerge.

At last the sun came up. Smacking your hands together because the others were. Squinted at the sun.

If you've come this far thank you for reading. A Painter a Poet is perhaps my favorite and most robust work to date. At the time of this writing there are still plenty of additions of A Painter a Poet available, as well as past projects some as low as 1 TEZ. Any support of my work is much appreciated, a project like this takes months of mucking around in code and chewing on pencils.

A Painter a Poet: https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/slug/a-painter-a-poet

Strange Lands: https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/slug/strange-lands-1

Robo Ishiguro: https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/15031

Breakthrough Moment: https://www.fxhash.xyz/generative/13675