“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim…It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”^[1]

Through the character of Basil Hallward in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde questions the purpose of art and whether the aesthetic of beauty brings more value to a work, or if it is the soul of the artist exposed for everyone to see that is more meaningful.^[2] His quote above expresses his personal beliefs on the purpose of the artist, the artwork, and the audience for which the art is intended.  This brings in questions surrounding ideas of the perception of art and what would occur should this perception be filtered through other means. Writing not too long afterward, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961) interrogates similar questions of perception. He philosophizes that there is a direct connection between what we perceive and our own experience that is directly responsible for imposing meaning onto those perceptions.^[3] If we remove experience, how does this affect how an artist creates art? Does it affect how the viewer perceives other artworks?

The late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, when both Wilde and Merleau-Ponty were writing, were filled with questions of the intersection between the arts and perception. The emerging sciences brought into question how perception works and how it affects sensation. The Impressionists, in particular, painted in the same era and were putting these questions into study through the painting of their works.  The Impressionists, like other landscape artists through time, were fascinated with the study of nature demonstrating the human experience of seeing the geographical environment.^[4] Their style was especially influenced by pantheistic and monist philosophies on nature as a concept, especially with the introduction of the ideas of German biologist, Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919). His theories concerned the interconnectedness of all life on earth and seeing the natural world through a lens centred on unity.^[5] Experiencing nature as a single unified ecosystem was important to Impressionists in painting and properly capturing the essence of the elements; as described by Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, nature to the Impressionists was “a universal synthesis in which matter and spirit, surface and depth, reason and the unconscious, the visible and the invisible resonated in unison.”^[6]

Claude Monet, for example, was not excluded from the adoption by Impressionists of these philosophies. He saw his immersion in nature as being in dialogue with the universe and all that it contains, expressing “everything the painter saw and felt around him, the life of things, and beings, terrestrial as much as celestial phenomena, visible and invisible entities.”^[7] Being alone among the flora and fauna allowed the painter to see what existed beyond human sight. Like the other Impressionists, he was influenced by pantheistic philosophies with elements of folkloric magic intertwined with them.

What if Impressionist paintings like those by Monet were filtered and perceived through another source, disconnected from the human eye? What does it mean to see a painting through the perspective of the digital realm? As Christopher S. Wood, and the theorist Ernst Gombrich, describe, technology “is a problem-solving process and does not claim autonomy…Technology makes measurable progress and yet does not depend on human virtue, only competence.”^[8] I created a work of art in AI based on a prompt that uses purely the formal qualities of Monet’s Water Lilies. The Impressionists, like Monet, relied on the sensation of being in nature. The work I created through AI was filtered not only through my perception of a landscape I have never seen in person, but an algorithm that uses images from across the internet to create a new work of art.

I first had to choose from Monet’s cast collection, a series of works that would best suit my attempt to create an AI-generated image. The first series to be considered was Monet’s Vétheuil series. After further research,  I decided to create an image based on his Water Lilies series, using three paintings to describe to the generator; the paintings used were from 1906, 1916 – 1919, and 1919. These works were chosen for several reasons. The main one was the time of Monet’s life in which these were painted. They were created towards the end of his career as he settled into his garden in Giverny and spent decades there. In the early 1900s, the idea of Monet’s garden and residence in Giverny was extremely important regarding the incorporation of experience into the artist’s perception and how he chose to paint. There were immense political tensions that were rising in France and Europe as a whole, and Monet’s strength was declining as he grew older. Paul Smith writes, “During the First World War, however, Monet could hear the munitions trains passing nearby on their way to the front,” and that through painting, it was “Monet’s attempt to hold on to a kind of experience that barbarians threatened to wipe out.”^[9] The garden was not only the location of some of Monet’s most infamous paintings but was a place of solace away from the war that raged across Europe; it was an escape that allowed the French painter to block out an outside world that only brought distress. By this time, he had already developed a style that had evolved over the years and a consistent focus on his desire to study light. To me, this experience was ideal for formally describing a painting to the AI generator; in describing only the aesthetic qualities, such as the colours used and the flowers present, I was effectively removing the experience of Monet and the sensations present in his Water Lilies. The aim was not to mention the artist’s name and observe what the AI algorithm created based on a purely formal description. The result was fairly close to Monet’s works [Fig 1].

Like Monet’s paintings, the image shows pink water lilies and green lily pads floating atop a pond. The lily pads, while mostly green, incorporate other colours such as yellows, reds, and blues. The delicate flowers that float atop the lily pads, while able to tell they are flora, do not take the solid form of a flower and blend into the rest of the lily pad.  The colours blue, pink, and purple were described in the prompt because of their commonplace in the works of Monet. The AI software fulfilled the request to use those colours. However, the lily pads are slightly blurred, almost as if they are melting into the water. The water is a mixture of blue, green, and purple; the water features the majority of the colours that were placed in the prompt to produce the image. Forms of trees and foliage as well as purple hues from the sky or flora can be made out in the reflection of the water. While the rest of the reflection in the pond seems to be blurred and melting down, the left corner shows the reflection of an almost realistic tree, as if it were a photograph. It presents a clearer outline of the leaves in contrast to the rest of the image. It is the reflection that provides a glimpse into the world beyond this fleeting moment captured by the AI. With the prompt “painting,” the program gave the image a painterly quality, the blurred effects resembling the individual brushstrokes commonly seen in impressionist works. Impressionist works are partially characterized by a large number of delicate brushstrokes used to create an overall composition that studies light; although different mediums, the brushstrokes in this AI image are not done through various paints, but rather it is the individual pixels that act as the brushstrokes of the digital image.^[10] Furthermore, Yiyuan Huang and Rong Chang express that while there can be characteristics of brushwork in AI images, like the image seen above, AI aesthetics are missing the aspect of simulating “physical interaction with the environment.”^[11] Compared to the original works that inspired this image, it maintains the colours due to the prompt and the elements of the reflection in the water as seen in the images mentioned prior. But what is the context of the paintings that was removed by AI?

Monet’s Process and Perception Studies

As mentioned prior, Monet’s life at Giverny was a significant time of his life. He moved there at an old age, buying the location in 1893,^[12] and the garden that would later feature the artist himself would cultivate some of his most famous motifs. Monet was passionate about the horticultural construction of his garden and he wanted it to be a peaceful space for him to paint in. He had help from outdoor workers in maintaining the garden, and the water lily ponds were his prized creation; he made a point to show any guests the pond.^[13] Monet’s affinity for botany enhanced his talent for painting, with these two art forms coming together in a merging of experiential creation. His garden took a large portion of influence from Japanese gardens. Japonisme was a common influential movement among Europeans at this time, and it is especially evident in the bridge constructed by Monet in the pond; he created a meditative space inspired by Japanese landscape paintings and woodblocks.^[14]

Monet’s process is something that viewers and those who study his art can only presume through analysis. He did not share his process with anyone nor take on any students; as Donna Paul states, he was a “mentor to few.”^[17] The Art Institute of Chicago also explains that he did not often let people see his works in progress and that most of the paintings that were perceptual studies, like those of his water lily pond, were not discovered until the 1950s.^[18] His works and expressions through art were personal to him, recording his perceptions of nature and how he felt in that moment of painting.

Being in nature to paint was not simply important in its function as a refuge for Monet. Impressionism as a movement relied on the sensations connected to being surrounded by the natural forces of the world. Being surrounded by everything the natural world had to offer despite the conditions was essential for Monet to paint; Laura Anne Kalba describes that “Monet frequently insisted in public and private statements that all that mattered – ever mattered – in art was nature.”^[19] Kalba goes on to say that “Painting directly in front of nature…was central to his definition of Impressionism as well as his sense of himself as an artist.”^[20] The sensations felt by the artist were vital in the expressions that took the form of paintings. It connects heavily to the pantheistic philosophies articulated earlier and continued to be a theme in the painter’s art until his last painting.

The study of light and weather conditions was a phenomenon that especially interested Monet. Using the pond as a study in reflection, he was fascinated and determined to represent how light breaks up; he used layers of colourful paint to portray the way the light looked when hitting certain objects as atmospheric conditions constantly changed around him.^[21] This effect is evident when looking at his Water Lilies series. There are hues of blue, pink, and purple blur upon hitting the pond’s surface. The viewer is only given a snapshot of this one moment, but the reflection in the water gives a glimpse of the potentials that lie beyond the canvas, something the AI image above emulates. It was the reflection in the pond that changed with every fleeting moment as the light and weather evolved that acted as the subjects of his paintings.^[22] His experience being in the same location was essential in his painting process as his paintings were a study of the natural sciences as well as a reflection of the sensations of the painter.

The vibrancy of the colours was intrinsic to achieving these effects. Kalba highlights the incorporation in the nineteenth century of colourful and bright flowers in leisurely gardens, influencing the impressionists; it was Monet who “was already extremely attentive to the effects of color created by flowers.”^[23] The emergence of the trend of vibrant gardens allowed Monet to find his inspiration in his studies of light and weather conditions. He filled his garden at Giverny with a large variety of flowers and documented them through the hundreds of paintings he would go on to create.

His old age and increased fragility as well as having cataracts, later posed a problem in his perception of colours and their vibrancy. This is evident in his painting from 1919 mentioned above; the bright blues that were once in his paintings are barely noticeable by that period. James G. Ravin explains “The cataracts that blinded Monet were an important influence on the way he saw the world and the way he painted it.”^[25] Ravin also emphasizes the blurred effect evident in his later paintings,^[26] showing how deeply cataracts affected his perception of the world. Like the layers of paint that he physically added to his canvases, there is much behind the story of his paintings with his health failing and the political turmoil raging beyond the confines of the canvas.

AI, Landscape, and Monet

As mentioned, Monet never shared his technique and took on very few students. His perception of colours was skewed by his failing vision at this time of his life. With this in consideration, how did the AI program re-create his painting from a similar point of view? Verity Babbs explains in her article that the result created by AI is a result of the algorithm compiling a variety of images from the internet to create a single composition.^[27] In a way, just as the pixels of a digital image are the equivalent of brushstrokes in the eyes of William J. Mitchell, the collection of images across the internet could be considered in the same way. Various images are amassed by AI, each contributing an individual factor to the overall composition in the form of binary code. Monet, being a well-known painter, has images all across the internet with his paintings belonging to various museums that upload his works. Ahmed Elgammal explains that it is because of this collection of images that AI images are merely an imitation rather than an individual creation.^[28] The works of Monet are one of the brushstrokes contributing to the algorithm as well.

There is still the issue of the idea of sensation which was an important contribution to Monet’s paintings. The AI image, as previously mentioned, was filtered through several layers of perception. It begins with my perception of Monet’s paintings and is further filtered through the perception of the digital realm. There was no immersion in nature involved, an element that was crucial in Monet’s creative process. Mitchell argues that there is still the process of perceptual filters even when painting. He outlines the difference between the filtering done by the Impressionist painters and the digital image; the painter filters the landscape in front of them subjectively and manually whereas the digital image performs this filter through mechanical means and objectively, making it more consistent in its depiction.^[29] Ultimately, it is a matter of the obliteration of the involvement of the human hand in the creation process. Using the theories of Merleau-Ponty previously discussed, the use of AI removes the influence of experience on personal perception of the landscape. Regarding the removal of context, Will Fenstermaker argues that the act of putting artefacts and art in a museum is already an act of removing context; it is placed into a new space, ultimately depriving it of its cultural context.^[30] Despite this argument, the museum has additional capabilities that AI and the digital image do not. Museums provide context through text panels, guided tours, and curatorial immersion whereas AI presents the image on a screen that reduces the size and impact. For example, the Musée de l’Orangerie presents Monet’s Water Lilies in a panoramic view that spans the entire room. The room was designed by Monet, and, as recorded by the Musée de l’Orangerie, he stated that it was meant to give the viewer “the ‘illusion of an endless whole, of a wave without horizon and without shore.’”^[31] He presented his works in such a way that maximized the ability of the museum space to immerse the viewer to stimulate the emotions surrounding sensation, something that the AI image above does not have the same ability to do. As expressed by Elgammal, “AI is becoming very good at following the rules, but the artistic spark in it is gone.”^[32]

Smith states that Monet’s “overriding ambition was to shape his art so that it would express his originality, his sensations, and not the personality of other artists.”^[33] He aspired to imbue his paintings with his voice and experiences, as seen through his Water Lilies series. Additionally, his paintings, and many other Impressionist painters, challenged the emerging technology of the nineteenth century, which was photography, through the application of the latest knowledge of light and optics.^[34] The implications of attempting to recreate his frozen moments of time in AI go against Monet’s philosophy as an Impressionist painter. It removes the experiential aspects involved in the painting of Impressionist landscapes, the sensations of nature being a crucial element of art creation to him. The removal of human involvement beyond providing the prompt is evident in the AI-generated image discussed in this chapter. It is but one of several images that was generated based on a collection of works by someone else. However, there is also a potential benefit to the use of AI in creating works based on Monet’s paintings and throughout art history. A project done by the Metropolitan Museum of Art used AI to preserve and recreate various paintings and artifacts. They explain that using AI provides the opportunity to visually understand lost objects and makes the experience of creating a work accessible to the world.^[35] While creating this image, although I was not in Monet’s garden painting the scene before me, I was required to notice the small details of the original Water Lilies. A new experience emerged, albeit different from the original philosophy of the Impressionists, yet a new creative experience nonetheless.

Isabelle Gray is a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Ottawa; she is majoring in Art History and doing a minor in Greek and Roman Studies. Her research interests involve the influence of religions throughout the history of art and works from the 19th century, specifically the movements of Romanticism and Impressionism.