Melissa Wiederrecht: Code, Color, and the New Canvas

Master of Contrasts: Melissa Wiederrecht’s Artistic Style and Inspirations

Melissa Wiederrecht’s work is a careful balance around the paradoxes of order and chaos, intention and accident, control and randomness — every piece serving as a testament to the balance of these contrasting elements.

Taking inspiration from abstract artists, Islamic art, and pioneers of generative art like Jared Tarbell and Tyler Hobbs, she has gradually developed a vivid, captivating style characterized by her use of blurs, textures, and linework.

The core of Melissa Wiederrecht’s body of work consists of a play between deliberate and accidental exploration of texture and color, where the intricate patterns and designs she uses pay homage to Islamic art, melding the traditional with the futuristic.

She achieves this result through the use of JavaScript, p5.js, and GLSL fragment shaders, implementing algorithmic procedures in which complex forms are created from simple rules, in a way that functions as a paint brush — combining blurs, textures, and linework with vibrant color schemes.

“Generative Art allows the artist to think in terms of an entire infinite space of images rather than just one or a few.  It allows a concept to be examined from thousands different angles, all at once.  It forces one to consider what the system is that brings the concept to life – how to define it, encode it, and visualize it.”
___ Melissa Wiederrecht