Tulipanis Cubes: cube_4_elements_earth

I have been a painter for many years, working in oil, and everything I make still begins there, with my hands, on canvas. Tulipani Cubes is where that painting learns to move.

Each Cube is a small program: a 9x9x9 cube turning endlessly in space, its faces built from my own oil paintings. Some hold a single painting, repeated and reshuffled across every side. Others bring several paintings together on one cube. Each follows its own unique path, continually revealing new relationships between colour, form and composition. Every Cube is a 1/1.

The idea goes back further than the technology. As a teenager I was fascinated by the Rubik's Cube. I taught myself to solve it, and something about it never left me: the idea that a handful of fixed elements could produce an astonishing number of possibilities. Years later, while looking for ways to bring my traditional work closer to the digital, I began experimenting by pixelating my paintings and setting them to movement and music. Trained as a business software engineer, I always believed I could eventually build the system myself. Only recently, was I finally able to bring that long-held idea to life.

At its heart, the work is about transformation. Each of my paintings captures a single feeling, held still in oil. The Cube releases that stillness, allowing familiar images to dissolve, reassemble and evolve into something new. The paintings never disappear; they simply reveal themselves differently over time. It is not a painting on a wall, and not a sculpture. It is a living digital artwork, built from traditional painting, mathematics and code.

You can see where it all begins at tulipaniart.com, where the original paintings and my earlier work still live. The Cubes are the next step: my analogue world, set in motion.