Hidden Picasso painting recreated through AI and 3D printing by Oxia Palus

Picasso’s blue period showcased several beautiful paintings,

and one such painting is The Blind Man’s Meal,

Characterised by its ethereal feeling that captures the hues of blue against its sombre background,

Hidden for a century, art revealed

the canvas at the time of Picasso’s blue period was one of the most mystifying of that era.
The most awe-inspiring fact of the blind man’s meal is not the portrait of a blind man but the fact that it is also a canvas for another masterpiece.
hidden for almost 118 years from the world lies a portrait beneath a portrait.

A female figure within the blind man.
Rediscovered using x-rays in 2010, and later reproduced by Oxia Palus,

An Artificial intelligence collective 11 years later by two technology doctoral candidates at University College London (UCL).
Named the Lonesome crouching Nude,

The hidden work was reproduced by combining AI,

spectroscopic imaging, and 3D printing
To recreate the portrait as close to the original as possible,

Oxia Palus founders Anthony Bourached and George Cann designed an AI algorithm that examined dozens of Picasso’s paintings and trained itself to imitate the artist’s style.
For their third recreation,

Machine Ai and 3Dprinting

the duo developed a full-colour, full-size painting, which incorporates 3D textured brushstrokes,

That wasfeatured at the inaugural Deep Ai festival,

held at the Morf Gallery in the arty London area of Shoreditch in October 2021.
Former Met director and CEO Thomas Campbell says,

” it is possible that this original new painting was in Picasso’s studio at the time he composed The Life.”

In a piece written by the art expert back in 2010, he said,

“scholars have long sought the original version of this work, which Picasso appears to have scraped off the canvas before beginning The Blind Man’s Meal.”

To reproduce the long-desired piece, Oxia Palus relied on its five-step technology to recreate artworks that have been painted over.

This type of reproduction, nicknamed “NeoMasters” by Oxia Palus,

requires,

first of all, X-ray and infrared imagery enables underpainting to be more clearly revealed.
However,

an element of the surface piece remains within the spectroscopic imagery, along with the concealed interior piece.

Then the team processes the imagery to separate the exterior and interior pieces.

The process

Next,

a neural network is trained on a number of artworks by the artist that is believed to have painted the underpainting.

This network can then stylize an image of the processed interior piece in the artist’s style.

Using the stylized piece with the processed interior piece,

a heightmap of the artwork is developed.

The heightmap gives the piece texture and is used in the last stage,
when the piece is created through 3D printing the artwork on canvas,

to the exact size of the original painting, using the stylized work and the heightmap.

Thanks to this novel “Neomaster” canvas, fans of Picasso’s iconic art made between 1901 and 1904 can see a new work emerge.

With its eerie touches and analogous colour scheme that illustrates the characteristic blue palette,

the sombre subject matter,

and destitute characters of Picasso’s Blue Period,

The crouching female figure superbly reproduced for anyone to look upon, now as a painting of its own in The Lonesome Crouching Nude.

Source: University College London (UCL)