Accidentally discovered something very interesting while messing around with the Photoshop remove tool, which on certain settings uses generative AI to replace out whatever you select with it.

In this case, was just playing around removing stuff from a photo of our living room, and saw that the tool was inventing paintings or posters that don’t exist:

That one in the corner, I zoomed in on and went through a few AI upscalers with and got this altogether vague still “detail” shot of:

It’s not on its own the greatest image ever seen, but there’s something spooky about how it looks and its ultimate provenance as an AI re-inventing my physical surroundings… almost has a ‘paranormal’ quality to me somehow. I had the idea of like, could I take these AI-imagined figments, and then do like I did with my Matisse copy and make human-done reproductions? Either as faithfully as possible to the original, or else with some enhancements by the human artist?

Here are some other examples. This photo was from about halfway through last year, and represented all the paintings I’d done lately (minus two in another room).

The funny part is, this original real photograph had a couple gaps where there was empty wall space. So I went in to those two areas (marked with arrows in image above) and used the Remove tool in Photoshop on them, and it invented these two other paintings that it thinks look natural there.

Eerily, the one on the left actually shares a lot of characteristics with a paintings which I did end up doing later on, this one, the Head of Hygiea:

Photoshop got the color scheme more or less exactly right, a good bit of the overall “vibe” but it just wasn’t able to see into the subject matter. But otherwise, I’d almost call that “prescient.”

Here’s one last one for the road, two paintings in storage in my small basement studio from over a decade ago (depicted at bottom half of image below). And alongside you can see the progressively extended painting that the Photoshop Remove tool created over a few rounds of trying.

The forms and mark-making on these AI-interpolations don’t quite ring true with my actual painted works, and they aren’t quite snazzy enough yet for me to simply want to replicate them manually. But these are just early accidents and experiments. There is much hyperspatial painting to be explored and uncovered here still.

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