There is nothing more refreshing than to watch an interesting film that combines the art of film, the art of suspence and the art of painting together. I was drawn to the exhibition from Singapore Tyler Print Institute, on "Pablo Picasso: The Vollard Suite (1930 - 1937)", firstly because of Henri-Georges Clouzot. His two other "Les Diaboliques (1955)" and "Wages of Fear / Le Salaire de la peur (1953)" had left me with lasting impressions and I was eager to see how he saw the Mystery of Picasso (Le Mystere Picasso (1956)).
Clouzot's intention is convincing: if we could see the entire process of painting in temporary dimension, we might be able to peek a glance into the mind of this great artist. The film set was extremely simple, Picasso sat on one side of his canvas which had a special transparency characteristic that could absorb and let ink bleed to the other side where the film camera was placed, capturing every single stroke or brush, color and layer that was applied, the painting (although effectively being a mirror paint) became alive!
There are about 10-20 pieces of different paintings that are played back from empty canvas to completion. Nearly for every artwork, the beginnging is just seemly arbitrary strokes, but subsequent some pattern emerges gradually, becomes clearer, then sometimes gets dissolved, transformed and morphed into something else - the changes are the mirror of the creative process - and this is also exactly the art of suspence of film is all about too. There is hardly any hesitation of where to put the next stroke, where to recoincile initially unrelated pieces. During the climax of the beach scene (as every suspence film should have), the canvas has experienced transformation of countless times, it is almost about several tens of layers of painting in one, as Picassso effortlessly moved his brush to show off, a canvas, empty or otherwise full of arbitrary color and layers, to him is just the same, as he mutters "its ruined, I have ruined the painting and yet at the same time, it is improving", I suddenly understand that "the most rebellious is the definitive interpretation".
About software. I relate the seemly arbitrary stroke to realization of software design; I relate repeated changes and scene transformation to refactoring. You can always change your mind during the latter, but make sure the mental design is already well shaped in your mind. To achieve that, you can hardly rely on the paper design in the patterns book, in the industry white paper, from the best practices, from the software factory: they should merely be the input to your thought process, rather than to be the output to align with.
Whether software programming is an art or a science has been debated for decades: I don't know the aswer either. But I strongly feel it is a gifted area that shares the best part of both worlds, it requires the metriculousness, analytical towards details and disciplines from the spirit of engineering, yet it possesses the freedom to create without fear of criticism and allows you to give lasting impressions to your audience (ie your user). Don't they say (Knuth): "let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do." I see this shares the most resembling trait with painting and composing music.
Go and watch the exhibition if you can, it lasts till 7 July, check out the details at Singapore Tyler Print Institute.
Posted
Jun 30 2007, 05:49 PM
by
blackinkbottle