Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters
The Potato Eaters is the first painting that appears in the online collection of the Van Gogh Museum’s official web-site. At first I thought that the paintings must’ve been listed alphabetically by title. The painting’s Dutch title is “De Aardappeleters”1. “De” (like other articles) is typically ignored when ranking titles of works and the “Aa” of Aardappeleters is pretty hard to beat when ranking alphabetically. But then you look at works listed at positions 2 and 3 - “Tuin met geliefden” (Garden with courting couples) and “Zelfportret als schilder” (Self-portrait as a painter) respectively, it’s obvious that unless Van Gogh’s entire oeuvre comprises of 3 paintings, the ranking is not alphabetical. The order is not chronological either. There must be some sort of curation at play here.
Van Gogh Museum - the online collection page
The Potato Eaters is an odd choice. The palette is dark2, which Van Gogh himself described as “something like the colour of a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course”. And while the subject is just an ordinary dinner scene of 19th century peasant life, meaning there isn’t anything particularly sad about it, looking at it at the museum always puts me in a pensive mood.
The Potato Eaters
My past jobs required me to work from offices that are in Amsterdam’s city centre - a mere 3 to 4 km from our home. I did not always take the most efficient route or mode of transport for getting to work. My morning commute would often mean walking at a comfortable pace through Amsterdam’s inner canal ring. Right behind Westerkerk, there is a stall that sells tourists’ favourite delicacy - potato fries. One day while walking past it, I realised that it had a replica of the Potato Eaters painted on its shutter! Except, everyone in this version of the painting is eating potato fries. The old woman in the right is still pouring coffee - albeit into paper cups. The aspect ratio of the shop’s shutter is different from the original so whomever painted it had to space the subjects out a bit. The choice of colour palette tries to be faithful to the original, at least in luminosity and saturation if not in hue. Time and weather seemed to have endowed it with the pathos of the original.
The Potato Eaters - french fries edition
The appropriation of Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters by this stall made me chuckle.
A few weeks later as I was walking past this stall again, I noticed that the painting on its shutter had been “re-touched”. Sadly, it looked more like something a primary school student learning to use Microsoft Paint would create than parody of a famous work by Van Gogh. A few other details had changed too. The woman in the right is no longer pouring coffee but is rather dipping a fry into mustard sauce.
The Potato Eaters - french fries edition (post restoration)
It reminded me of the incident in 2012 when an octogenarian amateur artist tried to restore a fresco of Jesus (Ecce Homo) in a Church in Spain and botched it up completely3.
Ecce homo
I am really not sure if this version of The Potato Eaters should make me happy or sad. I can now barely connect it to the original!
In line with the Dutch language’s propensity to concatenate words to make new ones.↩︎
and perhaps rendered even duller than Van Gogh originally intended as tends to happen to pigments from those times.↩︎
from the wikipedia page: While press accounts agree that the original painting was artistically unremarkable, its current fame derives from a good faith attempt to restore the fresco by Cecilia Giménez, an untrained amateur artist, in 2012. The intervention transformed the painting and made it look similar to a monkey, and for this reason it is sometimes referred to as Ecce Mono (roughly Behold the Monkey; mono translates to monkey in Spanish).↩︎
London - red-brick buildings
London’s red-brick buildings look beautiful around sunset. Taken on an unusually warm and sunny October day:
Roofs of red-brick buildings at Exhibition Road
I’ve rarely ever seen TV antennas on roofs in Amsterdam. I was a little surprised to see how common they still are in some parts of London.
London - Strand/Fleet Street/St Paul’s Cathedral
Eurostar now runs direct trains from Amsterdam to London. There is a small terminal on platform 15B of Amsterdam Centraal Station where you show up an hour before the train’s departure for immigration formalities. After a cursory security check, the Dutch immigration officers register your departure. Barely two meters behind them, the officers at the UK immigration booth register your arrival. You then try to find a seat in the cramped lounge and wait for the train to depart. The train stops at Rotterdam, Brussels, Lille and finally at the St. Pancras1 Station in London. The journey takes approximately 4 hours.
The last week of October has been unseasonably warm this year in Western Europe. London was no different. With maximum temperatures of 19-22ºC on most days of our trip, we spent a lot of time walking. Our jackets, light as they were, spent most of their time tucked inside our backpacks.
Some pictures from a nostalgic walk from Strand to Fleet Street to St Paul’s Cathedral on the first day of our trip:
Temple Bar Memorial Dragon
Apex Temple Court Hotel
Former Press Association and Reuters building
Spire of St. Bride’s Church
Entrance to a building next to the St. Martin within Ludgate Hill church
Dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral
A window of St. Paul’s Cathedral
Which I always read as St. Pancreas, the patron saint of diabetes.↩︎
Talking of Vermeer…
Woman reading a letter, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1663
Rijksmuseum is organising one of the biggest (if not the biggest) exhibition of Vermeer’s works next year. According to reports in the local media, of the 35 or so known works of Vermeer, about 27 or 28 would be present at the exhibition1.
I haven’t found an official confirmation of that number. Nor an inventory of the works that will be present. The official press release announcing the exhibition (all the way back in Dec 2021) seems to have been pulled from the Rijksmuseum website, but an archive.org copy is still around. It does not mention the exact numbers either, but does mention a few of the prominent works expected to be at the exhibition:
The Rijksmuseum’s exhibition in 2023 will include masterpieces such as The Girl with a Pearl Earring (Mauritshuis, The Hague), The Geographer (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main), Lady Writing a Letter with her Maid (The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin) and Woman Holding a Balance (The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC). Works never before shown to the public in the Netherlands will include the newly restored Girl Reading a Letter at the Open Window from the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden.
The logistics of putting together such an exhibition must be mind-boggling. The negotiations with museums across the world alone must’ve taken months. And then there is the problem of safely transporting2 some of humanity’s most precious artifacts. It must complicate declaring the final number of works that’d be present at the exhibition - especially if not all of them will be there for the entirety of the exhibition.
The exhibition starts on Sat, 4 Feb 2023 and ends on Sat, 10 Jun 2023. The ticket sales have already begun. Naturally, I’ve procured them already!3
Nota bene: Rijksmuseum’s own collection has only 4.↩︎
With all the environmental activisim going on these days that involves people glueing themselves to works of art or throwing tomato soup at them, I am dreading how intrusive the security at the museum would be.↩︎
I hold a virtual copy in my hands with all the trepidation of Vermeer’s maidens holding letters. I am now a little wary of buying tickets this far in advance. For a good reason. The last time I did it was for concerts of Beethoven’s Late String Quartets to celebrate his 250th birth anniversary in 2020. I ended up traveling to the US to onboard for my new job on the concert dates and the pandemic took care of the event calendar for the remainder of the year.↩︎
Thoughts on DALL•E 2 #2
Dall•E 2 understands different art styles. When given this prompt:
An oil painting of a rubber duck wearing medieval robe by Van Gogh
It surprised me with this:
An oil painting of a rubber duck wearing medieval robe by Van Gogh
It even gave these ducks a little toy rubber duck of their own which I thought was a nice touch. I really loved the second image. My only peeve with it was that it was a little too ‘tight’ and cropped the headgear. Fortunately, Dall•E also allows ‘inpainting’. You can erase parts of an image and ask it to fill the missing bits in. I shrunk the original a little and asked Dall•E to generate the rest. The results were more satisfactory:
An oil painting of a rubber duck wearing medieval robe by Van Gogh (‘Inpainting’)
I tested the same prompt but changed the name of the artists.
M.F. Hussain gave these:
An oil painting of a rubber duck wearing medieval robe by M. F. Hussain
and Dali these:
An oil painting of a rubber duck wearing medieval robe by Dali
Vermeer is another of my favourite painters, so naturally my next few prompts asked Dall•E to re-imagine his “A girl with a pearl earring” - but with a raccoon.
“A racoon with a pearl earring” by Johannes Vermeer
produced these:
A racoon with a pearl earring by Johannes Vermeer
I guess “with a pearl earring” doesn’t necessarily say that the pearl earring goes in the ear1. Only one of the four variants made the connection. I tweaked the prompt and tried to be really explicit about the positioning of the earring but was only partially successful.
A racoon wearing a pearl earring in its ear by Johannes Vermeer
A racoon wearing a pearl earring in its ear by Johannes Vermeer
All that playing with raccoons got me thinking of Rocky Raccoon from the epoynomous The Beatles song. Depiction of violence is strictly forbidden by Dall•E so prompting literally from the lyrics of the song:
Rocky Raccoon
Checked into his room
Only to find Gideon’s Bible
Rocky had come equipped with a gun
To shoot off the legs of his rival
Merely got me a warning about the request not following Dall•E’s content policy.
Dall•E content policy warning
I tried some creative prompt writing to try and coax Dall•E to render the scene from the song:
A raccoon with a book in one hand and a blunderbuss in its other hand by Johannes Vermeer
A raccoon with a book in one hand and a blunderbuss in its other hand by Johannes Vermeer
A raccoon with a book in one hand and a pistol in its other hand by Johannes Vermeer
A raccoon with a book in one hand and a pistol in its other hand by Johannes Vermeer
I got pictures of raccoons with misshapen, incipient gun-like objects that vaguely held capacity for violence, but nothing even close to what Lennon-McCartney intended in their lyrics.
Given the tremendous potential for abuse for generative AI I can see why Open AI (the organisation behind Dall•E) would be extremely cautious about what they allow on their platform. I don’t think this achieves much. All it does is ensure that they don’t have a public relations problem on their hands. Real world depictions of these subjects aren’t going away (is Tarantino going to work on another film?) and now that the generative AI cat is out of the bag, there’ll be other models with no qualms about depiction of violence or religion or some heady mix of other taboo subjects.
Reminded me of this “exact instructions challenge” video: ↩︎
Thoughts on DALL•E 2 #1
Last week, I tried to move our coffee table (with a few heavy books still on it) to its correct place in the living room. The table is no longer in the wrong place. Unfortunately, now my lower back is. I’ve therefore been at home. A lot.
Fortunately, I also got my DALL•E invite that week which gave me something to fill my time with.
For those of you reading this post who might not have heard about it:
DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.
The Open AI website makes it really simple to use it. You enter your description or “prompt” in a text box, click the generate button, wait for a few seconds and you’ll be presented with four square (1024px by 1024px) images to choose from.
The first prompt I issued to DALL•E was1
“Astronauts playing cricket on moon”
I got these four pictures back:
Astronauts playing cricket on moon
Three were cartoonish digital art (one had even been titled as if by a first grader - cucket cinn - cricket scene?), while the last one looked sufficiently photo realistic.
Astronauts playing cricket on moon - the photorealistic version
Playing cricket professionally requires you to wear a lot of gear. I liked how DALL•E tried to give the players cricket batting pads under their spacesuits. It also retained the original spacesuit helmet - a cricket helmet alone on moon would be very problematic indeed. The bat in the hands of the player in the front looks something futuristic while the bat in the hands of the player behind is more recognisable. Although its handle is either weirdly long (and broken) or the player is holding a bail in his other hand. The face of the player behind is a distorted smudge. The ball looks like a worn white one - so that settles the question of the game’s format on the moon. There is only a single stump behind the main batsman. There is also a weird piece of debris between the two batsmen - random glitch or is it one of those white discs that fast bowlers use to mark their run up? I guess we’ll never know.
What race or skin tone should the AI have given to these depictions of humans? To say nothing of their gender. Did DALL•E try to cop out of having to settle this question by generating generic illustrations of humans in spacesuits as the first three choices?2.
My attempts at getting more specific with this prompt didn’t get me very far:
Astronauts playing cricket on moon with three slips and a gully and earth rising in the background
Produced these:
Astronauts playing cricket on moon with three slips and a gully and earth rising in the background
Again, for the astronaut cricket theme, DALL•E leans towards generating images of low fidelity drawings.
DALL•E makes it really simple to generate variations based on the version you like. Generating variations of the third, somewhat photorealistic image gave results that looked rather disturbing:
Astronauts playing cricket on moon with three slips and a gully and earth rising in the background - photorealistic variations
For some reason the cricket bats seem to take on impossibly long handles - to the point that they become oars. And cricketers themselves seem to take on tortured, contorted forms with nightmarish faces and missing or extra limbs (or parts thereof). In one variant the astro-batter even seems to be attempting to commit Seppuku with their bat.
Staying on with the cricket theme I tried something closer home:
Sachin Tendulkar playing a pull shot while riding an elephant in Mumbai
Which gave:
Sachin Tendulkar playing a pull shot while riding an elephant in Mumbai
Open AI does not allow you to generate faces of celebrities due to the sheer scope of misuse and legal complications that would entail. So no, I wasn’t expecting to see Sachin Tendulkar but some vague likeness of his.
I see Sreesanth in one if I squint really hard but not Sachin.
And I knew from the past experiment that DALL•E has, let’s call it, a serious cricket bat problem, but here it was shockingly inept. Long poles these are, cricket bats these are not. Notice that I did not mention the word “cricket” in my prompt. It still seem to have made that connection somewhat - as evidenced by those white balls flying around and the blue of the Indian cricket jersey.
The elephants look real, even though 6 out of the 8 variations I generated were missing tusks. There is even a reddish stone wall in the background of one of the variants, the sort you are likely to come across at a temple in South India. The AI seem to have made a connection with the likely surrounding of elephants in India (or at least the surrounding that is likely to dominate the pictures in its training set):
Sachin Tendulkar playing a pull shot while riding an elephant in Mumbai - outside a temple perhaps?
The aesthetic of these pictures is definitely redolent of the Subcontinent - there is a small crowd of people in the background in most of them - as there undoubtedly would be were Sachin to venture to do the thing my prompt says. The sunlight is harsh. The colours of clothes is what I’d expect in a random sampling of people from India. And of course, given the setting of our scene, this time the AI seems to have suffered no predicament about the colour of people’s skin. That said, nothing about these images makes me think that are set in Mumbai.
It might be tempting to dismiss DALL•E based on the quality of these results. There is more to DALL•E than generating photorealistic images of cricket in impossibly absurd settings.
I’ll be sharing more examples in the coming days.
Why astronauts? There are a lot of pictures of the sort “astronaut(s) doing something” on DALL•E’s homepage. And this is perhaps what anchored my first prompt. Why cricket? I really don’t know - I guess I was going for something that I’d strongly identify with.↩︎
The reality with AI is often more anodyne - it merely reflects the images the model was trained on.↩︎