If you’ve a mind to create your own Christmas cards, wrapping paper or table decorations this year, your first thought would probably not be to use a spreadsheet program. But any technology can serve the artist.
Many famous buildings, from the Gherkin in London to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, couldn’t have been created without computers. David Hockney even had a creative period with a Polaroid camera and a Xerox photocopier machine.
The rows and columns of a spreadsheet lend themselves very well to a particular artistic style or, in Dutch, stijl. Any spreadsheet that allows you to colour the cells and adjust the width of the columns and the height of the rows will do. You can use Works, Open Office, Google spreadsheets or, as here, Excel.
De Stijl was a magazine published by Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg from 1913 until his death in 1931. It was also the name of an art movement, centred in Holland at the time, but now recognised worldwide.
The artists, designers and architects involved were reacting to the chaos in Europe at the time, while celebrating the precision made possible by machinery. You can produce your own De Stijl-type artwork using Excel, reflecting the harmony the original artists achieved with simple coloured rectangles.
There is seldom any point in copying another artist’s work. It’s much more satisfying to see what you can do yourself. But you can certainly be influenced by a style. Open a new worksheet in Excel. Drag the columns to adjust the widths to suit.
Highlight a range and use the Fill Colour tool to create a rectangular colour shape. Make more random shapes within a larger rectangle and choose Cells, Patterns on the Format menu for a wider range of colours. Choose Options, View on the Tools menu (or tab in Excel 2007), remove the gridlines and you have a composition inspired by Theo van Doesburg.
If you right-click on an Excel column heading and choose Column Width and enter 0.83 it’s about right for creating vertical black lines. (The number that appears in the Standard column width box is the average number of numeric digits of the default text font for the Normal cell style that fit in a cell.) Right-click on a row letter, choose Row Height and enter 8 and you should be able to make a comparably thick horizontal black line.
Generate your own coloured rectangles between the lines, enter some lettering appropriate to the season, and you can fashion a personalised Christmas card in the style of the most famous De Stijl artist, Piet Mondriaan popularly known as Mondrian.
The De Stijl variant of abstract cubism lent itself to many arts, including architecture and even furniture by Gerrit Rietveld in the 1920s. Another two-dimensional application of the form that can be planned with a spreadsheet is stained glass. The specialist here was Vilmos Huszra.
Some of the arts can overlap. Cornelis van Eesteren drew stylised floor-plans for De Stijl houses that are themselves artworks. You might well print out variations of designs like his, laminate them and mount them on cork, and you could have a set of complementary table place mats.
Happy anniversary
At the end of a year it’s permissible to wallow in a little nostalgia so let’s
celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the introduction of the first Windows
version of Excel and the first time Excel was available for the PC.
Microsoft has always been primarily a marketing company and software developer rather than an originator. All its popular programs were originally bought in and Excel is no exception. In 1985 Microsoft bought a spreadsheet called Multiplan and first sold it for the Apple Macintosh.
So when Excel was adapted for the PC in 1987 it had to be called Version 2. It included a run-time version of Windows and moved from R1C1 referencing to the A1 referencing most familiar today, though you can still refer to a cell by its row number and column number, as is popular in macros.
