Channelling my inner Mondrian: With a little help from my cat friend (+AI)

Back in 2022, during the Knowledge 22 conference by ServiceNow, I had some free time to wander around The Hague.

While I initially set out to visit the Escher Museum, I accidentally ended up in the Kunstmuseum and discovered the work of the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. Those apparently simple geometric compositions in primary colours captured my attention. I couldn’t stop looking! A new obsession was born!

When I returned home, there was all this hype around AI-generated art and DALL-E 2. I had to try it!

So I combined my newly developed obsession for Mondrian with an old one: cats!

Digital artwork inspired by Piet Mondrian’s composition style, featuring a stylized black and white cat with striking yellow eyes, set against a background of geometric shapes in primary colors.

The results were impressive for someone like me with the artistic abilities of a 4-year-old child, but nothing too special. After a lot of trial and error, I decided to move on.

2 years later…

The hype is not fading.

My obsession with cats has increased.

My obsession with Mondriaan has declined.

But I tried to mix them anyway during a course I was taking this weekend on how to use the “new toys” in some real-life scenarios.

I uploaded an image of a real cat to MS Copilot and just asked to draw it in Mondrian style. And the first result was really cool this time. No fancy prompts needed!

Stylized, geometric representation of a cat’s face, composed of bold, flat colors and segmented into various shapes and patterns, strongly reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s abstract geometric style, emphasizing straight lines and primary colors.

I’m setting an alarm to try it again in two years! ⏰

If you are looking for something more impressive on the changes in GenAI in the past 2 years, check this article by Ethan Mollick that inspired me to perform this test.