I've always wanted to be a painter. If there's anything magical about art, surely it is in the alchemical transformation of oil paint to its subject. But art classes always made me feel lacking in innate talent, as though asking for specific instruction was a sign of weakness. So now I teach myself to paint by building robots.
These robots have transformed the way I look at art. Trying to break down painting into its component parts has made clear that which is vital. It has made every painting in the world interesting. Submitting the robots and their paintings to formal critiques from established members of the art world has allowed me to gain the benefit of their knowledge without exposing myself too much emotionally: the robots don't get defensive like I do. Their paintings aren't very good yet and neither are mine, but the progress is marked.
Inspiration:
Before I built my first robot, I took a trip to find the longest-standing painting traditions I could. I ended up in Bhaktapur, Nepal, sitting on a floor painting thankgas twelve hours a day with two Buddhist monks and their apprentices. It was wonderful. Theirs is a slow and meditative practice— I spent the first two days just preparing my brushes— and refreshingly humble. Their subjects, techniques, and media are entirely mandated by tradition because their art is devoted to maintaining those traditions. Anyway, one of my favorite lessons was how to cycle brush strokes with breath. The paint only touches canvas when the body is still. Since few robots get the opportunity to breathe, it seemed a good place to start.
Successes:
The robot was small, contained, and imperfect. People responded to it warmly, unafraid, and the snoring sound of the breathing mechanism was sweet and relaxing. It was human in unexpected ways. Since it was more mechanical than computational, it was possible to reverse-engineer every mechanism with sight alone.
Failures:
Painters Katherine Sherwood and Squeak Carnwath ripped apart my use of pre-primed canvases and generic paint poured straight from the bottle. Supplies are expensive, and I'd been hesitant to spend money on what I assumed were going to be bad paintings. Logical, but a self-fulfilling prophesy. Also, the brush moved very slowly, and the acrylic paint would end up drying and entombing the brush before much progress was made.
Inspiration:
Noting the lessons from Painbot 0, I returned to Nepal and spent half the summer learning their canvas priming and stretching techniques, and observing their masterful execution of mandalas (circular, symbol-rich paintings used for meditation). Summer's second half was spent on the Black Cloud, a collaborative project about pollution centered around the active placement of homemade passive sensors (sensing light, among other things). My ears now more finely tuned to painters, I heard them often speak of the light in paintings, but I didn't quite know how to see it for myself. So, I thought I'd build a robot that painted light.
Successes:
I stretched her canvases, prepared oil paints for her, and struck a balance between control and randomness. This gave the paintings legs to stand on: they were interesting before you knew they were painted by a robot. Nila really benefited from simplicity; paring her down from her initial complexity allowed me to focus on the nature of the oil paint itself. In the Modernist tradition, Nila and I make paintings about painting. The simplicity of hardware and software meant it was easy to transport her between exhibitions and talks, and comfortable to leave her with curators.
Failures:
She is messy and has ruined many brushes. The paintings are interesting aesthetically, but they lack symbolic reference. I used random noise as a means of getting better coverage, but that took away from it being an actual painting of the light in a space. Failed attempts to use color in her third and fourth paintings inspired all the color research you see in the other pages of my site.