Seine
Seine creates alternative renderings of Ellsworth Kelly's 1951 painting, Seine. The project is built in Python, and uses the Image module from the Python Imaging Library (PIL.)
Background
In 1951, Ellsworth Kelly painted Seine, in which:
- "Each of the first 41 columns contains one more black rectangle than the one to its left."
- "Each of the next 40 following columns contains one more white rectangle than the one to its left."
(Quotes from here.)
In creating this piece, Kelly both represented the Seine, a Parisian river, and stumbled upon many of the notions that are at the core of percolation theory.
Today, Seine is held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
What Seine Does
This Python script, when it is run, asks the user for:
- The number of images to create (the default is 1.)
- The width of the output image in pixels (the default is 3000 pixels.)
Then, Seine creates the requested number of Seine lookalikes, and saves them as PNG files in the directory it was run from. When it comes to aspect ratio, Seine's output is relatively similar to Kelly's painting.
Here are three example renderings:
1
2
3
