Early Light
- 2023
- 27” x 88”
- Brushstrokes: 673

Early Light is an example of the fusioneering pathway and constant personal evolution. Its inception was marked by a period of thoughtful exploration and experimentation following the completion of the painting, Meditation Upon Death. As Paul pursued various ideas for his next piece, he found himself drawn to the soft, sublime beauty of the growing pre-dawn light.
Early each morning in the pre-dawn light, while sitting by a window facing east and fueled by a cup of coffee, Paul would be lost in that creative space exploring ideas for his next painting. Days and weeks would pass by. While probing and developing numerous ideas and accumulating dozens of sketches and notes, he found himself marveling at the coming dawn’s changing hues, and soft, quiet, sublime beauty. Inspired by these moments, he wondered if it would be possible to capture their essence in a robot-created painting?
With this aspiration, Paul realized he would need to evolve his use of color, brushwork, and design to higher levels of artistry.
Color

It turns out developing this palette of soft, subtle colors was unlike anything he’d done before and presented a unique challenge. This struggle is well documented in the video “Paint Room.” available in the accompanying VR tour of his studio and galleries of paintings.
Brushwork

As David Leffel taught Paul years ago, the brushstroke is “the heart and soul of painting.” Thus, to capture the essence of “that moment” in a painting, entirely new mathematical brushstroke algorithms needed to be developed in collaboration with Dulcinea. Notice their resulting softness and delicate interplay of color as the paint reaches the canvas.
Design

To fulfill his vision for this painting, Paul needed a new “tool” to capture and express the design for this pre-dawn first light. He likened this need to those of Newton, Maxwell, J.R.R. Tolkien, and musical composers.
Newton needed a new tool to help him develop his ideas in physics, so he invented calculus. Maxwell needed a better expression of calculus for his theories and so developed differential calculus. Tolkien needed a world in which to ground his linguistic experiments, and so created Middle Earth. Just as these men created a means to express their visions, and just as a composer can write music first on a page, Paul would need a new way to express his vision to Dulcinea.
Paul conceived a fusion of tools: a new programming language to capture the essence of a painting, akin to music notation representing a symphony. Through extensive programming and experimentation, his concept took shape. Paul developed a language where each “note” represented a brushstroke of paint on a canvas. Seeking to bring greater spontaneity and creative excitement to the process, Paul introduced colonies of AI agent “ants” to orchestrate the spatial arrangement of the musical chords that would become Dulcinea’s brushstrokes. After the observation of hundreds of sunrises and countless developmental iterations, each press of the program’s run button produced a new simulation of the ant colonies arranging progressions and chords of notes, but in this case the notes were expressed as brushstrokes.
The result of this fusion of efforts was a soft, quiet display of luminous, sublime beauty.