Inwardness

A homage to Hilma af Klint, Agnes Martin, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

December 18, 2021

A homage to Hilma af Klint, Agnes Martin, and Georgia O’Keeffe. I studied the color palettes from their works and generated palettes. It’s amazing how much you can feel the emotion just through the colors.

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Inspiration

From Wiki page of Agnes Martin:

Agnes Bernice Martin, RCA (March 22, 1912 - December 16, 2004), was an American abstract painter. Her work has been defined as an “essay in discretion on inward-ness and silence”.

Technical Notes

I used k-means clustering to find the color palettes of artists I liked, by specifying the number of k from 2 to 10. Then I randomly select a palette and draw color strips based on the frequency of the color in the original artwork. Some white noise is added in the end and pixels randomly swapped for a more organic look.

def generate_palettes_from_img(img, theme=None, nmin=2, nmax=10):
    results = []
    cols = ['theme', 'n', 'r', 'g', 'b', 'freq_start', 'freq_end']
    for n in range(nmin, nmax):
        hist, cluster_centers, clt = kmeans_colors(img, n)
        accu_freq = 0
        for i in range(len(cluster_centers)):
            row = [theme, n]
            freq = hist[i]
            cluster_center = np.round(cluster_centers[i], 2)
            row.extend(list(cluster_center))
            row.extend([accu_freq, accu_freq + freq])
            accu_freq += freq
            results.append(row)
        plot_palette(hist, cluster_centers)
    df = pd.DataFrame(results, columns = cols)
    return df

Here is an example for Paul Klee’s work’s palette.