AI Ways of Seeing: Homage Picasso
Part Three of the Visual Essay Series, With All Original Art
I am excited to present the third installment of the AI Ways of Seeing medium.com series, which is exploring art somewhat in the iconoclastic tradition of the great book by John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972, Penguin Books). This book was hugely influential in my intellectual and creative development.
Before exploring my Faux Picasso style, you might like to see the previous essay in the series:
Faux Picasso
Berger presents essays in words, but he also presents visual essays — paintings — and does not make any commentary on them. We will implement this idea, too. At a later stage we can talk. The art of the visual is about seeing, isn’t it?
Nevertheless, with Picasso I need to explain certain things. Pablo Picasso has been so influential, and his stylistic elements so distinctive, and his output in such large quantities, that the AI has no difficulty with finding and expressing something in a Picassoesque manner. Anyone can just put in a prompt with “style of Picasso” in it, and they will get back something. But this becomes something of a problem in itself when the result is not married with intention. So, with Picasso we need a plan.
Picasso’s greatest work, the Guernica, is a monumental canvas three and half meters tall and eight meters wide. It deals with the horror of war and is just as relevant and pertinent today as it was in 1937. It is possible to create murals with AI using the technique of outpainting, but at the moment I cannot deliver anything in that vein.
Fortunately, Picasso was also a portraitist. We will thus focus on the erotic and somewhat personal, even playful, Picasso style while trying to say something that is still relevant in 2022.
That’s all for now. Next time we will take on a more controversial and confrontational visual style, that of Robert Mapplethorpe.
If you enjoyed this story you may also enjoy learning about my Spaceship Earth AI Project: