I have admired the work of the artist Bridget Riley for a long time. She is now in her eighties, but as it seems still very creative and productive. Some of her recent work combines simple triangles in fascinating compositions. The longer I look at them, the more patterns I recognise.

Yet, the actual painting can be explained easily, in a sense of a specification document to reproduce the pattern precisely. However, seeing the real print, as I had the chance at the London Art Fair last week, and a reproduction on the screen is incommensurable.

Having said that, I could not resist programming a figure that resembles the artwork labelled Bagatelle 2. Well, at least I can say that I learned more about grid [1], grid.path [2] and gridSVG [3] in R.

R Code

References

[1] P. Murrell. R Graphics, Second Edition. CRC Press. 2011
[2] P. Murrell. What’s in a Name? . The R Journal, 4(2):5–12, dec 2012.
[3] P. Murrell and S. Potter. gridSVG: Export grid graphics as SVG. R package 1.5-0. 2015

Session Info

R version 3.2.3 (2015-12-10)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin13.4.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X 10.11.2 (El Capitan)

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] grid      stats     graphics  grDevices utils  datasets 
[7] methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] gridSVG_1.5-0    data.table_1.9.6

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.2.3   RJSONIO_1.3-0 chron_2.3-47  XML_3.98-1.3