Oct.9, 2013
In 1888, in search of sunlight and peace, Vincent van Gogh moved to Arles in south France, where he created many masterworks. One of them is the famous sunflower series. It was August, the sunflowers were blooming, and Van Gogh desperately wanted to capture them on his canvases to decorate the room to impress his friend Paul Gauguin. Dr. Jan Hulsker, one of the world's foremost scholars of Vincent van Gogh, suggests that the sunflower series "perhaps more than any other of his paintings, have made him known throughout the world. They are often the only works with which he is identified."
Earlier, five of van Gogh's best-known works, including "Sunflowers" and "The Harvest", have undergone the treatment in a project backed by Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum using 3D Printing technology developed by the Fujifilm unit of Fujifilm Holdings Corp. And now, inspired by the Sunflowers painting, artist duo Rob and Nick Carter wanted to bring it to life by creating a bronze interpretation of the artwork using 3D printing. In collaboration with creative visual effects studio MPC, which is known for its computered generated imagery for scenes in films World War Z and Life of Pi, the duo translated van Gogh's painted images of sunflowers into 3D digital files.
The team first built a computer generated "base mesh", a 3D model that has all the details of the volume of the piece and how the flowers filled a 3D space. "The key was to create balance from all angles; ensuring it would be compositionally attractive from every viewpoint, whilst ensuring that looking from one angle means the artwork remains true to van Gogh's painting." noted the team.
These 3D files were then 3D printed using a high-end ProJet 3500 printer with a resin material Visijet-X. The print resolusion is only 16 microns. Then the printed flowers were cast in silicon bronze.
The piece is one of the most complex and intricately detailed bronze artworks ever created. "In some ways it was a very succinct and uncomplicated brief," says MPC's 3D Creative Director Jake Mengers, "yet under the surface lay a myriad complex challenges. These included translating an impressionist approach to a 3D sculpture, adapting van Gogh's signature brushstrokes to three dimensional sculpts and applying creative license to the areas that aren't visible in the original 1888 painting."
As part of the exhibition "Transforming" by Rob and Nick Carter, the 3D printed "Sunflowers" is on display until 2 November at The Fine Art Society on New Bond Street in London.
Via: Cool Hunting
Posted in 3D Printing Applications
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