Art of Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was an American artist who inspired the minimalist movement and the conceptual art movement. Both of these are interesting for people trying to recreate his artwork on computers. Minimalist art tends to being simple. Conceptual art is art that is expressed as a set of directions which are then executed by someone else. The art work is conveyed with the instructions, not with the manifestation of those instructions. A lot of his art works are wall art, meaning that they take up a whole wall, not a mere canvas. This allows the art to be shipped by sending only the instructions. An installation can be a LeWitt painting one week and not the next week simply because the instructions have been transferred to someone else.

His instructions sometimes come with a lot of hidden meaning. Divide the area into four quadrants, into each quadrant draw one of the four line types. Usually this art is done on a square area, but it can be applied to a rectangle or even to the four quadrants being side by side. It is understood that the four line types are horizontal, vertical, slanting to the right and slanting to the left. It is also understood that the lines are straight. The lines are assumed to be “equally spaced”, although this is a bit more ambiguous. Does it mean equal spacing along an axis or equal perpendicular spacing between lines. The directions imply that the lines of each type are parallel, but says nothing about the line spacing or the thickness or the color of the lines. The executing artist has some leeway in interpreting the instructions to fit the particular installation. Some of his instructions are more particular than others.

From a computer point of view his instructions are like an algorithm for drawing the art. Even without the instructions, it is fairly easy to reverse engineer one of his drawings back to a set of instructions. Regardless of how derrived, these instructions can then be turned into the more detailed instuctions of the actual computer code. Again the coder has a lot of freedom in implementation. What is the color and width of the lines? Is the design responsive (does it react to changes in the size of the display window).

Gallery of LeWitt art executed with Turtle Graphics

Slide show of LeWitt art executed with Turtle Graphics