Tuscany

Tuscany is a program that paints Tuscan vineyards in oil. Every run makes one canvas. It starts with stretched linen, primes it, and rubs a thin wash of earth colour over the gesso, the way a painter tones a canvas before starting. Then it lays the picture in with a loaded brush. Each stroke carries a little more or a little less paint than the one before, and the bristles drag tracks through it. Where a stroke ends, the paint piles up into a lip.

The paint has height. Alongside the colour, the program keeps track of how thick every stroke is: the ridges the bristles leave, the paint squeezed out at the edges, the knuckle of colour where the brush lifts off. The last thing it does is run a raking light across the whole surface from the upper left, the way a lamp in a room would catch it, so every ridge picks up a highlight and every groove holds a shadow. That light is in the room, not in the picture. It’s the difference between a picture of a painting and a painting.

Underneath, the landscape is real geometry. The rows of vines are walls of leaves about a metre high, standing on a ground that rises and falls, seen through a camera standing in the field. They converge because they’re parallel, and they’re painted back to front, from the far crest down to your feet. The sun is a direction in the sky, so the shadows of the rows fall across the alleys the right way and stretch out toward evening. The cypresses throw long shadows too. Past the vineyard, the hills are laid in one behind another, patched with fields, olive groves, woods and white roads, with a hill town or a farmhouse on the ridge now and then.

Every canvas has an hour (dawn, morning, midday, golden hour or sunset), a season (spring, summer, the harvest or autumn), and a place to stand: in an alley between the rows, on a cypress lane leading up to a farmhouse, at the foot of a vineyard climbing a hill, or up on a brow looking down the rows into the valley. Each one gets a vineyard name and a real town it could be near.

Every canvas starts from a number. Same number, same painting, down to the last bristle mark, and no two numbers give the same one. None of them are saved anywhere. A canvas is a seed plus the program, and it gets painted again from scratch every time someone opens it. That’s why the small one on your phone and a six-foot print are the same painting: the program plans every stroke first and only then decides how big to make them.

Underneath the paint, written across the toned canvas in thin umber, is the program’s own source code, along with the charcoal lines the composition was laid out on. Oil covers what’s under it, so you only see the writing where the paint breaks and the ground shows through, in the gaps of the sky or at the edge of a stroke. I like that the instructions are in there, mostly hidden, the way an underdrawing is.