Tuesday, February 19, 2013

artist post 3 - tony robbin

An artist who stuck out to me from the Paul Hertz reading was Tony Robbin, an artist and geometry aficionado. When I first read about his exploration of different dimensions and perspectives and means of conveying them on a 2 dimensional canvas, I thought of Cezanne and his paintings composed of multiple perspectives knitted together, or the Futurist artists who blended abstract imagery to create a sense of movement and time progression.


2006-7 by Tony Robbin. Acrylic on canvas

Like paintings from those movements, Robbin's art stands out not just for its engaging color palette, but its genuine dimensionality. Even without an understanding of the method or mathematics underlying the above painting, I can appreciate the shapes and objects that show up, from up close or at a distance, as defined by color or by line. Wikipedia places Hertz under an art movement called "pattern and decoration", which both embraced floral geometry and rejected the flatness of minimalism.

What interests me most about Robbin, however, is the contribution he's made to visualization of the 4th dimension. He recalls his interest in digital art as stemming from an encounter with CGI tesseracts in 1979.


One popular visualization of a tesseract, a four-dimensional shape related to the 3-dimensional cube, represented as a 3D CGI model. Created by Jason Hise in Maya.

Robbin believes not only in the importance of visualization for scientific thought, but in the importance of aesthetic, of beauty and elegance: "Art based on geometry is expected to be dry with only primary colors - who wrote those rules?"



Robbin's contributions to the world of geometric computer imaging and 4D-to-3D projection have been greatly important scientifically, but his paintings stem as much from a love of color and form as from a love of the mathematics underlying them.

Here's Robbin discussing his interests in a vid from the 80's:


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