The art in this book is one painting, three times — and then once more, finished.
It is a canvas by the artist, photographed as it was made. First the color field: red and pink blooming at one corner, teal laid over the rest. Then yellow worked in across the top, until the three colors share the surface. Then the finish: white loop-flowers raised over the whole field, so the completed piece is loops, hundreds of them, standing on one shared ground.
The stages open the parts of the book in order — the first washes before Part One, the three-color field before Part Two, the finished surface before Part Three — and the finished piece is on the cover. Two closer photographs of the finished canvas, taken at an angle so the raised loops catch the light, appear inside.
The plates are cropped from the artist's photographs to the canvas only, with the colors unaltered. The cover and the part plates are settings made from those plates: the finished painting set full-width on a dark ground sampled and darkened from its own deep teal, the part plates cropped as bands and details, each in a thin cream frame on a ground sampled from its stage, with light sharpening only. The painting itself is nowhere retouched.
Art credit: the painting and the photographs are by Douglas John Brownfield. The cover setting and the part plates were made by the assistant from the artist's plates, as described above.
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Douglas B. is an independent builder and artist based in America. The author writes plain-language books about the tools of the present moment — what they are, what they are for, and how to tell one from another — working from primary sources and dating every claim that can go stale.
This book began with a practical problem. New AI models are announced faster than anyone can follow, and the names turn over within the year, while the kinds underneath them hold still. The author went looking for the map — kinds first, current models as dated examples inside each kind — and wrote the one he had needed.
The artist's paintings carry the art of his books. The one in this book, loops over a shared field, is described in About the Art.
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