Computer graphics traditionally focusses on creating photorealistic images. However, for more than 20 years, computer graphics researchers have also worked on creating abstract visual representations. In my talk, I will give an overview of our research in this field. I will show how we apply such techniques in different fields ranging from landscape visualization to CAD. I will describe the projects related to our painting robot e-David, which is the basis from which we study human and machine painting. Using this machine, we create paintings with different media and in different styles completely automatically using a simple visual feedback loop. I will discuss the role of creativity in this process and how we want to incorporate artistic freedom and higher- order styles in the future.