The Town Square: an e-Canvas Painting

Imagine if you will, a painting of a sleepy Old World village featuring a sundial in the town square. As the day progresses, the shadows of the buildings wend their way across the painting and the sundial shows the correct time. During the late evening the streetlamps turn on and banish the encroaching darkness as the shop windows darken one-by-one except the clockmaker's which conveniently features a rather large clockface. Finally midnight and the candle in the last little window in the apartment above the greengrocer's is blown out. Occasionally during the night, a faint outline of a cat can be seen lurking in the alley or sitting on a fence.

"e-Canvas" (the technical bit of the idea) is an e-paper variant, combined with a minimalist chipset to be programmed by the artist; it provides variable reflectivity in pictures which use translucent paint pigments. In the given example, while it's an actual painting of the town scene, all the shadows are provided by the e-Canvas: moving dark areas corresponding to where the real shadows would be; the night effect is provided by darkening the entire scene save where the streetlights brighten things up. (The streetlights are e-darkened during the day, as are the shops and apartment windows.)

And it actually looks like a real painting, because it is. Easiest brush media would be watercolour which pigments are already translucent, but I like the idea of textured brushstrokes in oil.