My Latest Display Background
Latest picture I’m using for a screen background.
This started as a blurry photo I took through a moving car’s window as we were driven around the Dalmatian Coast a few years ago. It shows Trogir, Croatia, a town sitting on a tiny island in the 200 m wide gap between the mainland and a much larger island. The town is near the city of Split, where we had just spent a few days, but had long been ruled by Venice, where we were about to spend the rest of our vacation.
I compressed the color palette of the original photograph in order to reduce the number of colors. I like how this turns the indefinable image of a photo into a field containing a small number of colors arranged in irregular geometric figures. A row of trees becomes a line of blobs in green, olive, dark green, gray, and blue.
I try to get the same effect sketching with magic markers but it never works. It is pretty satisfying doing it on an industrial scale with Matlab. The original RGB values for each pixel are integers between 0 and 255. I transform each value V by creating a new value N = ((V-20)/50)*50. Because the numbers are integers, the result of dividing is also an integer, so many different values of V turn into only a few values of N. For this figure, I also blended the original photo with the altered version, with the amount of blending varying smoothly from one part of the picture to another. Finally, I also blended in another version of the picture for the land beyond the water in the background. That version was converted to black and white, smoothed, and had its contrast enhanced, in order to give a more obvious texture to the trees and buildings in the distance.
I like the way the picture shows lines of houses and trees in the foreground and hills in the background, with Trogir itself barely visible in between except for a single tower. When you get to the town itself, it is a strange mix of the ordinary and the fantastic, a parking lot and cute modern footbridge leading to Venetian gothic buildings and crooked allies crowded together on a football field’s worth of land.
We caught a ferry to Italy, an overnight ride. We took a room for us and another for the boys (teenagers at the time), but many of the people chose not to spring for the extra cost and so were curled up on chairs or lying on sleeping bags in the hallways leading to stairwells. It made it feel like a scene from the 90s, when Drubrovnik, a few hours’ drive further up the coast, was being shelled by Serb militias instead of basking in sunshine, and refugees were fleeing from the region rather than to it. An old man sat next to us at dinner and told us that he was from Firenze and that his ancestors worked for the Medici’s. I thought everyone in Firenze had ancestors who were Medici’s, but I was impressed anyway.
In the middle of the night my wife, in the bunk bed below mine, woke me up to ask if we were safe. The ship wasn’t exactly rocking, it felt more like we were in a truck on a bad road or a bus going too fast over speed bumps. Each bump made the deep rumble of the engines skip a beat. Just as I started to tell her that the waves looked pretty small, a barrel’s worth of water splashed against our window. It didn’t seem like the Adriatic was even big enough to have storms, but I knew that in the old days the Venetian galley caravans only traveled in the summer, for safety. Then again, this was the summer. Though clouds covered one hundred percent of the sky, small whitecaps still glowed in the black sea. Perhaps it was the light from the ferry.
Then it was morning and we were back to the brilliant sunshine of previous days. When I picked out my Trogir picture I may have been thinking about Cezanne’s “Gulf of Marseille Seen from L’Estaque” though whenever I look at Cezanne’s picture it is less pretty than I remember. That seems like a mark of success though. Imagine producing a painting that people enough to (1) make an effort to see it and (2) are disappointed when they do!