Johan Sebastiaan Ploem - Digital Painting

Digital Painting

Early days
Bas Ploem started painting as a small boy, making copies of paintings in the house of his parents in Heerlen, a town in the south of the Netherlands. He lived there until he was eighteen. While still at secondary school he used to take the train to the nearby town of Maastricht to attend an evening course in drawing and painting at the “Kunstnijverheidsschool Maastricht”, which was later converted into the ‘Academie Beeldende Kunsten Maastricht’ (Academy of Art, Maastricht). After finishing high school he had the chance to opt for a further education in art, but decided to study medicine instead.

Meeting with the painters Frits and Yves Klein in Paris
During his medical studies at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, he had the opportunity to work as an intern in the Hospital Broussais in Paris under the supervision of professeur Pasteur Vallery-Radot, the grandson of Louis Pasteur. Ploem’s presence in Paris was important for his knowledge and interest in art since he could regularly visit his cousins in Paris, the painter Frits Klein and his son Yves. He visited the Kleins when Yves was making his first monochromes.

Analogue paintings
During Ploem’s entire career, painting remained a factor in his life, its intensity varying with the workload, first in medicine and later in medical research. On the basis of this lifelong activity as a ‘Sunday painter’ an exposition of his analogue paintings was organized in 1992 in Pulchri Studio in The Hague on the occasion of his retirement as a professor from Leiden University, The Netherlands.

Computer image analysis for the creation of digital graphics
In the last years of his activities at the faculty of medicine at Leiden University, he concentrated on research in image analysis. He was asked to participate in a European project with the aim of automating cancer cell recognition using computer analysis. It concerned a collaborative project with the German optical company Leitz/Leica Microsystems, and the Institute for Mathematical Morphology in Fontainebleau, France. Together with a team, Professor Jean Serra at this institute had developed an image analysis method, now internationally known as ‘Mathematical Morphology’ (MM). With his experience as an analogue painter, Ploem quickly saw the possibility of also applying the methods of mathematical morphology to human faces, landscapes, buildings and flowers. Instead of looking at cells, the computer programmed for image analysis, can also look at the optical information of an image scanned into its memory by e.g. a camera. Unfortunately not Mathematical Morphology program was then available for use on a PC. It was only years later, on a visit to the firm Leica Imaging Systems in Cambridge, England, that Ploem accidentally saw a CD with the Mathematical Morphology program that could run in Windows on a PC. He received a copy of this program on loan and immediately started to use it for digital painting experiments.

Mountain flowers as the first topic for digital image analysis
Since Ploem is a nature enthusiast, he started with the application of mathematical morphology programs to the image analysis of meadows covered with mountain flowers. To get inspiration for his art work he frequently made nature walks in the region of the Pyrenees known as the Cerdagne, and specifically in the Eyne valley also known as the ‘La Vallée des Fleurs’. These first digital graphics of nature scenes were shown in his exposition at a regional art centre in the Pyrenees (Ossega, June, 1997).

Scientific interest in computer graphics created with mathematical morphology
As he was probably the first person to systematically use mathematical morphology for the creation of digital art, Ploem’s work attracted international attention and he was invited as a plenary speaker at an international mathematical conference in Amsterdam in 1998 to explain his new type of digital art. He also received an invitation to show his art work in an exposition at this conference. The organisers of this meeting asked Ploem to write a chapter on his novel technique for digital art in a book (Kluwer, ISBN 0-7923-5133-9) that was published on the occasion of this meeting.

Exposition at universities
When scientists in France became more aware of Ploem as a digital artist, they invited him for a symposium on ‘Art et Science’ at the University of Caen, France (April, 2001). At the art exposition connected with this symposium, he presented 6 digital graphics that were dominated by chaotic transformations of rock art themes. A similar invitation was made by the University of Basel in Switzerland (April, 2002). His exposition of digital graphics in Basel also showed works which were created with the so-called ‘watershed transformation’ of Mathematical Morphology, resulting in pictures resembling mountain ranges.

Acceptance of digital art
Generally spoken, digital art still suffers from a lack of acceptance by a wider public. One of the reasons may be that this type of art is sometimes difficult to understand or to explain. For Ploem as one of the early developers of digital graphics using image analysis, it was encouraging that the well known museum ‘Fondation Beyeler’ in Basel, Switzerland already had a separate curator for digital art in 2002. At the time of his exposition in Basel he was invited for a discussion with this curator about the future of digital art. They discussed the massive interest in digital art while still waiting for the emergence of more significant digital art by young artists who have been growing up with computers. The words ‘Digital Art’ typed in together in the advanced search made of Google now results in more than 300 million references!

Portraits and architecture
In recent years Ploem has spent time studying more conventional topics in art like portraits and scenes with architecture. The availability of special mathematical morphology software such as the ‘Top Hat’ transformation made his attempts at creating portraits rather interesting. This famous algorithm was developed by Fernand Meyer. As an assistant of Professor Jean Serra in the earlier mentioned Institute of Mathematical Morphology, he came to the University of Leiden, the Netherlands in order to write programs for the recognition of cancer cells visualized under the microscope. He is now director of this institute in Fontainebleau. The ‘Top Hat’ algorithm enhances the recognition of structures mainly based on contrast in the image rather than on edge detection. If applied to a human face it makes a novel type of drawing that is different from a drawing made by most artists. If followed by several other MM image transformations, it can produce (digital) portraits characterized by structures that were not directly evident in the original picture.
For the painting of scenes with architectural components Ploem used a program for 3D rendering, that permits structures drawn in 2 dimensions to be visualised in 3D. This enabled him to effectively use perspective in some of his paintings. Whatever the future judgment about the artistic value of Ploem’s art form will be, it is clear that he has created novel approaches for the creation of digital graphics on the basis of image analysis, and as such he can be considered as a real pioneer in this field.