Let a Thousand James Hugonin Paintings Bloom
by Pete Hindle
James Hugonin is an artist who lives in Northumbria, and makes paintings that reflect his surroundings by taking the predominant colour for each day and painting a square in that colour. This is very procedural art, and therefore it lends itself very well to make a computer program that does the same thing.
This would probably annoy the bejesus out of Hugonin. Sadly, this is not my concern, as this is another exercise set my Jamie Allan, my tutor. Obviously, if you’ve seen my last piece of work for him, you might be getting concerned that Jamie is actually running some form of art world Project Mayhem, and that all graduates of the DM course will be changing their name to Bob soon. This is probably not the case.
I am Pete’s complete lack of surprise.
If you’re going to procedurally fake something, why just fake one? Therefore I set the program to stop cranking out fakes at a thousand. The colour’s a bit off, as if Hugonin had suddenly found his Northumbrian idle surrounded by flesh tones, but it holds together. The video ends up being 8.20 long, with two “paintings” every second.
Oh yeah, we’re getting those Hugonin’s happening alright. I think he’d be equally horrified and embarrassed of the attention. As a fan of the work have to say whilst a like the look of all the DM Hugonin’s I’ve seen they just don’t operate in any comparable way, but then if we added in the actual complexities of his work, five figure repeating pattern, different fill areas within the defined grid, over painting etc.
whoops, there goes my two pence and just for the record Mr Hindle here solved my issue on making my version on this assignment work. Cheers Pete, you the man.
no comparison, of course, meant to Hugonin’s work or process. i’m quite a (new) fan of the work i’ve seen.
what i’m interested in is what makes these approaches different? is it just the stories we tell ourselves about the work, something about the work itself, a kind of traditionalism or romanticism, or the ‘ol making-things-to-counteract mortality, etc., etc.?
what precisely changes when these processes become ‘procedural’?