Catherine Roberts – Geometric Abstraction

I was inspired by Sonia Delaunay’s  “Rythmes Colores” collection for my geometric abstraction. I love the simplicity of her artwork and how the colors flow seamlessly from one circle to the next. My favorite pieces were the ones with her circles stacked on top of each other. The smaller circles inside the larger circle made the finished product look like an eye, which I found really interesting. Additionally, with multiple “eyes” stacked on top of each other, to me, the composition looked like the face of a monster, a traffic light, or maybe a strangely colored snowman. A few of these pieces are depicted below:

                             

                              

With Sonia Delaunay’s artwork in mind, I created a three circle stack. Each large circle was actually made up of three circles of varying sizes and colors. I used three bangs in order to have three color sets for the artwork, so all nine circles changed color with each bang.  See the image below for my Max circuit:

Due to how large the screen was it is hard to see the details of the shape code, so here is an explanation of the different sections. The three buttons at the top correspond to color set 1, color set 2, and color set 3, respectively. The three shapes on the left make up the bottom circle. The smallest circle is the top shape and the largest circle is the bottom shape. The circles are scaled 0.05, 0.1, and 0.15 with 0.05 being the smallest circle and 0.15 being the largest. The circles are off center with a position of (0, -0.4). The three shapes in the middle make up the middle circle and the three shapes on the right make up the top circle. These shapes have the same specs as the bottom circle except the middle circle is located at position (0, 0) and the top circle is located at position (0, 0.4). I had some trouble trying to get Max to layer the circles in the pattern that I wanted, so the largest and the second largest circles are actually a torus. This fixed the problem and gave the largest circle an extra thickness that I liked.

Below are the final products of my abstraction using each color set.

Color Set 1

Color Set 2

Color Set 3

One Comment Add yours

  1. Kyria Nelson says:

    The simplicity of this project is both a draw and a set back. It is very clean, clear and easy to read; the colors change the mood of the piece immensely. However I feel like it is lacking a key bit of complexity, or perhaps asymmetry, to make it truly pop.

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