“Who is the painter?” John Klotz wondered upon looking at Impression for a Sunday? The artist is actually a software program called Dynamic Auto Painter developed by Román Cortēs and Roman Voska. You begin with any photograph of a person, an animal, a still life or a landscape. I chose a rather commonplace image of the shroud face from Shroud Scope. You then select a style along with materials such as oils, chalk, watercolor and so forth. I chose oil painting with a Van Gogh brush style and a brownish palette. The software does the rest by interpreting visual elements of the image it was fed and then recreating the image in the desired style. Pour a cup of coffee and sit back and watch. It is fascinating to watch. Yesterday’s picture took about ten minutes. This pencil sketch below – which is truly amazing if you view it from different angles on a laptop or LCD monitor – took about five minutes.
Dan,
The use of the computer program to generate the picture creates interesting, but resolvable, issues under the copyright law.
It clearly transforms the object being manipulated so I doubt there can be any claim of copyright by the holder (if any) of the copyright of the object being transformed. But does the program user obtain a copyright of the finished product. I might think so. The interesting claim might be by the author of the program but I doubt that would fly.
But maybe someone on the blog may have a better incite into this than I do.
Neat! Looks like a lost Alberto Giacometti piece. :)
Speaking of questions about the identity of an artist…
One of the things that always stuck out to me about the Shroud and claims of it being the work of an artist (a highly skilled one no less) is what it doesn’t contain. As most people know, we artistic types are somewhat vain; we don’t share our “glory” with other people easily or often. We do the work, we want the credit, the fame, and the bucks. Now, if the actual Shroud really is a work of art, we have to ask this question:
What kind of fool artist would create such a masterpiece of a perfectly proportioned portrait of a deceased male with a level of detail so exact as to catalog his cause of death to forensic experts centuries later (arguably unappreciated until modern times) and then forget to sign his name?
And don’t forget that an artist signs there name is three basic ways: (1) their actual signature; (2) their style; (3) their choice of subject.
Just throwing this out to the Shroud community.
Anyway, let the discussions and investigations continue on this most studied artifact in the history…
Joshua