Computer Technology Generates Van Gogh’s Next Painting

Jeroen van der Most, Future Van Gogh. Photo: Jeroen van der Most.

Like far too many artistic geniuses, Vincent van Gogh was a man who died before his time, passing at the relatively young age of 37, depriving the world of perhaps hundreds more masterpieces. Now, a Dutch artist has attempted to right that cosmic wrong, using computer technology to analyze Van Gogh’s known works and generate a prediction of what the troubled artist’s next painting might have looked like, reports the Art Newspaper.

A trained statistician, Jeroen van der Most input no less than 129 Van Gogh paintings, each with 5,600,000 pixels, into a specially-designed computer programming code. The program’s analysis generated a statistical model, which Van der Most used to paint his own prediction of a never-realized Van Gogh canvas.

Currently, the “lost Van Gogh” is on view at Amsterdam’s NH Museum Quarter Hotel as part of the exhibition “Back to the Future: Van Gogh,” which includes other work by van der Most inspired by the Impressionist master.

All things considered, it’s definitely less creepy than trying to recreate the artist’s famously severed ear, as was recently successfully accomplished by another Dutch artist, Diemut Strebe, as part of an exhibition at the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (see artnet News article).


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