Painting

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

As the folks at Christie’s are delighted to point out, it marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool, that is, in the context of a double portrait. For indeed, swimming pools had transfixed Hockney ever since he first arrived (out of cold grey Northern England) in sunny Los Angeles, in 1964, and, as with so much else about LA, the young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things which everyone else in the Southland had been taking for granted.

As I drew my first still-life, my instructor noticed I focused on perfecting a section of the composition before approaching other areas of the scene. She pointed out how the drawing would become out of proportion if I continued.

...I worked and reworked the drawing, visually connecting the parts of the composition until it matched the scene.

About half-way through my drawing, I realized I had detached myself from what the objects depicted. The vase was no longer a vase; the bench was no longer a bench; the flowers were no longer flowers. The elements of the scene were all one, a single composition of reflected light, shadows, and darkness.

The approach I learned that day stuck with me for the rest of my life. I apply it in my art and design as well as how I think, write, and make sense of things.

It taught me to step back to see the whole and appreciate its connections before digging into the details.

In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?