ShapeVision Art : Martin Brooks

Welcome to ShapeVision Art — exploring the expressive power of Extreme Vector Graphics ™.
Please contact me.

CLICK on each PICTURE to see a CLOSE-UP, then use your browser’s zoom, or download & view in an app.

This site is best viewed on large screen with high-speed internet. Here’s why:

ShapeVision is printed art.

Natural shapes are captured from photographs, with articulation at all scales, from huge to tiny.

ShapeVision art is printed large, exposing more detail as viewing distance descreases.

ShapeVision prints show crisp detail even when viewed by microscope.

The close-up files on this site are as large as practical, but they aren’t large enough to show all detail. Please zoom your browser or download and use an app, but know that the pixels you encounter are NOT present in ShapeVision art.

Solo Work: Portraits

Portrait of my Mother, Aaron & Pan, Portrait of Michael

Family and friends, highly personal.

Solo Work: Occupation 2022

I made one visit to Parliament Hill during the 2022 Ottawa occupation. Working with images helped me reflect on this difficult situation.

Solo Work: Phase Transition

Look closely at edge of snow in early spring by zooming into the close-up. One of a series exploring the edge of disappearing snow at the season changes.

Diverse Solo Work

Quiet City evokes Aaron Copeland’s trumpet piece of the same name. Record Album Cover symbolizes the vinyl LP format. Bunch Grass 2 and Bunch Grass 3 capture form as movement as life. Farm Panorama paints a majestic autumn landscape, with some surprises.

Collaborative Work: Hidden Shapes of Nature ™

Together with Ross Photography and ShapeVision partner John Spence. For more information and pictures, please see here.

Wind and Robin included here because I composed them. Source by Ross Photography.

ShapeVision math seems out of reach to many people (see here if you are curious), but may be easily understood as follows:

The math treats each pixel of a source photo as if it were elevation data for a topographic map, with contour lines of equal brightness. Certain contour lines are selected to appear in the picture as the boundaries of shapes. Each shape has a single colour, determined by the colours of the pixels within. The artist controls the transformation from pixels to shapes using software dials and sliders, resulting in a wide range of vector graphics to use in artworks.

I call ShapeVision software ’the beast’, but it is quite tame to use: Photo in, vector graphics out. ShapeVision creates extreme vector graphics, comprising 10,000 - 100,000 shapes, many having thousands of boundary points. Extreme Vector Graphics ™ is a challenging medium for which there do not exist artistic or technical precedents.

ShapeVision inkjet prints reveal sharp shapes down to printer resolution. This is the view through a 20x optical microscope; the shape details are barely visible to the naked eye.