April 7, 2011
Replaced
"Replaced" by artist Mike Ruiz was created by using photoshop's content aware fill to paint out the Mona Lisa, leaving only her background. The image was then sent to a Chinese copy artist to be painted in oil.... It's a nice try for a computer + copy artist, but I don't think the landscape would be so photoshoppy repetitive, I'll bet the copy artist could have done better on his/her own. Also shouldn't the title be 'Removed'?
I've seen a couple of artworks playing on this idea although this and this one are the only ones I've found online (as an aside MegaMonaLisa is one of the more bizarre sites I've stumbled upon this week).
The landscape in the background has long been a source of studys. One popular theory holds that the background is a painting of the landscape near Bobbio in Northern Italy, based on the theory that the numbers 7 and 2 (hidden in a span of the bridge in the painting) refer to 1472, when a flood washed away Bobbio's bridge. This seems farfetched to me.
Some believe the bridge is the Buriano, near Arezzo. Other historians based on information in Leonardo's topological surveys believe the background depicts the area near the confluence of the Arno and Chiana rivers (In this scenario the sitter obscures a view of Lake Chiana). This seems like a more reasonable theory to me, although it's just as likely Leonardo just drew a background he created from whole cloth.
(Mike Ruiz image is via Good)
to this site
04/10/11 04:00 PM
Casey said...
There was a fun Flickr thread where somebody wrote that as these technologies get better, you could critique a photograph of a car by saying: "I like this picture but just remove that car entirely" (with content aware fill, of course)
This fun collection of people taking pictures of the Mona Lisa:
http://mika.yukidoke.org/monalisa/
Mona Lisa converted to vectors, translated into chinese characters the size of a tweet, then translated into an english "poem":
http://enthusiasms.org/post/143734124
These oil paintings bought over the internet of the outsourced painters' views:
http://clementvalla.com/index.php?/work/paintings-from-wushipu/
And these outsourced paintings of a ubiquitous stock photo from squatted domain landing pages:
http://www.parkerito.com/parker_ito/index.html
04/10/11 05:35 PM
raul said...
Mona Lisaism should be it's own blog. Here's another: http://topworth.blogspot.com/2011/03/most-expensive-copy-of-painting-mona.html and another (this is pretty awesome): http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/china_copy_artist/ (click on #19)