An Artist 'Un-Goghed' van Gogh, and the Results Are Fascinating

gogh, un-goghed pic.twitter.com/qR4wEQ11Yl

— Kyle McDonald (@kcimc) August 31, 2015

On perhaps something of a whim, Kyle McDonald, a visual artist who works with code, recently attempted to digitally remove the style of one of the 19th century’s most iconic painters—Vincent van Gogh. As McDonald noted on his Twitter account, he was “trying to un-gogh gogh.”

McDonald’s first post features digital remixes of van Gogh’s 1889 paintings, Green Wheat Field with Cypress and Wheat Field Behind Saint-Paul, as well as a self-portrait, also completed in 1889. While McDonald manages to take take the van Gogh out of van Gogh with these two, they’re also a bit too blurred to stun the viewer; though maybe these are works in progress.

But McDonald’s remix of the self-portrait, which he titled gogh, un-goghed, visually and conceptually succeeds in ways his other attempts do not. It’s a mesmerizing look at van Gogh’s vibrant and colorful impasto style stripped of its swirling brushstrokes; a style that made so many paintings seem like they were moving in some attempt to convey, as Aldous Huxley theorized, a natural psychedelic vision of the world.

status: trying to un-gogh gogh pic.twitter.com/zg0wJh8VTP

— Kyle McDonald (@kcimc) August 31, 2015

In McDonald’s reworking, van Gogh and the space around him are still. There are no psychedelic oscillations. It’s just van Gogh staring at the viewer, and somehow McDonald has managed to make the painter’s face, especially his eyes, look almost real. At the same time, the remix is also this interesting blend of analog painting and digital manipulation, which leaves it still just a little warped from the everyday reality we experience.

McDonald’s experiments have impressed his fellow artists. Software artist Golan Levin, for instance, called the experiment “seriously brilliant,” while it left Anton ‘Vade' Marini troubled.

“I'm having a strange reaction to this… [t]roubled is as close as I can get,” Vade responded via Twitter. “Having difficulty conjugating why. Its brilliant no doubt. I suppose the fact I am having a strong reaction is a great barometer to being on to something powerful.”

This may just be McDonald experimenting for experimentation’s sake, using inspiration from a paper recently posted on ArXiv, “A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style.” Or it could be the first attempts at a series exploring the digital deletion of van Gogh’s, or even other legendary artists’, iconic styles. Either way, the results are interesting to look at.

Click here to read Kyle McDonald's writeup on "Comparing Artificial Artists," an exploration into the processes that made un-Goghing van Gogh possible.

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