Studio Series: Homage to Claude Tousignant

A funny thing happened last week. Our neighbourhood had a planned three-hour power outage on a cold afternoon, so that the Hydro company could do some upgrading (why they would do this in Winter, I do not understand). No power = no heat or lighting = no studio work. Since I knew about the outage well ahead of time, I scrambled to get as much done in the morning as I could. That morning's Adobe Illustrator learning module involved polar grids. I almost skipped it because it looked boring. I'm glad I didn't because I figured out how to ungroup the circles so that I could colour each one differently (this wasn't part of the learning module, just more curiosity kicking in). 


That afternoon, I visited the Art Gallery of Hamilton where I saw Claude Tousignant's Accelerateur Chromatique. "Hey," I thought, "that's a polar grid!" When I got home I played with approximating his painting in Adobe Illustrator. As I was doing so, I wondered how Tousignant chose the colours and which colours to put next to each other. Claude Tousignant is a Canadian born in 1932. Accelerateur Chromatique, acrylic on round canvas, was painted in 1968.