Several Circles (Einige Kreise)
by Vasily Kandinsky
Kandinsky painted this picture to synthesize “the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.” I chose the image because while it is made up of only circles, they arranged in a convoluted and confusing way.
In processing, I wanted to recreate this image as accurately as I could. I started by creating a dark grey background. After that, I just drew whichever circle I felt like drawing. However, after drawing about ten circles, I realized that there were too many circles to keep up with, so I organized the canvas in sections and drew circles in each section. The sections included the top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, the large blue circle, the medium-sized pink circle, the medium-sized green circle, the five warm-colored circles, and a section of the miscellaneous small circles scattered throughout the canvas. After that, finishing this project was just a matter of generating accurately-sized and colored circles in positions that were accurate relative to the other circles. Originally, I set the canvas to be 600×600, but I later resized to 650×650 because I realized that I had positioned the circles too far apart.
I do think that I was able to mimic the painting pretty well, but I know that the original painting required more technical skill. There were two elements of the original painting that I could not recreate in my sketch, namely the gradient glow around some of the circles and the irregularly colored overlapping sections of the transparent circles. For example, in the original, the overlapping section between a yellow circle and a salmon-colored circle created a pastel pink color, but with my ability in Processing, this section was of a light orange color. One more thing I would have done differently is to include the “noStroke” function on most of the circles. I realized while writing this documentation that I could have avoided the outline on some of the circles, but it was too late to go back and change it. The following image is my version of the painting:
And my code:
