… in which I report on a genre of AI art that I hadn’t realized existed. But first, the story of how this genre came to me. I tell this story without any names attached to the people who wrangled with a piece of this art on Facebook yesterday — because all evidence of this discussion has somehow vanished from my Facebook; I did, however, save a copy of the Mystery Painting that triggered the discussion and then was able to reconstruct the gist of the exchanges from memory.
The Mystery Painting. This came to a friend labeled as a reproduction of a painting by Edward Hopper with the title The Dory. My friend was pleased to have come across a Hopper not known to him:
(#1) Atmospherically Hopperesque: a lone female figure in an urban setting (a railway station); also at night, with lights piercing the dark and the rain
Others chimed in to cast cold water on the poster’s delight. One observed that there was indeed a 1929 Hopper painting called The Dory, but it was, no surprise, a painting of a dory (‘a small flat-bottomed rowboat with a high bow and stern, of a kind originally used for fishing in New England’ (NOAD)) — nothing at all like the scene in #1. And then another volunteered that they had searched through an inventory of Hopper paintings and there was nothing like #1 in it. The consensus was that this was some sort of AI creation, masquerading as a Hopper. The disillusioned poster was dismayed.
The hunt and the find. I then spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to track down what #1 was. Searching on Google Images, doing a series of Google searches of the net. Eventually, I tried searching on “Homage to Edward Hopper” and discovered a gigantic trove of stuff by many hands (some by traditional artists, also many created using AI resources). In which, several pages down, appeared #1:
on the Etsy site, under the title Waiting for the train, labeled as an Edward Hopper-inspired printable wall art download, designed by The Non Museum in Barcelona (offering “unique printable art inspired by famous artists”); Etsy sells you a printable file of the work (price apparently determined by demand, so fluctuating, but apparently most in the range from $8 to $9), which you can then print out and have framed
A whole genre of AI art that was brand-new to me. The aim is to create not jokey or grotesque versions of existing artworks or familiar scenes — La Primavera in Niagara Falls, Hopper’s Nighthawks with velociraptors as the characters, whatever — but to create a new image that reproduces the style and characteristic content of some artist’s works so faithfully that it could be a hitherto unknown work of theirs. Like the faux-Hopper Waiting for the train.
But sold quite clearly as artist-inspired work, not masquerading as an actual work.
Last I looked, The Non Museum had 18 Hopper-inspired artworks. Some quite plausible, like this one:
(#2) Rain in New York — sufficiently evocative that for a moment I tried to identify the intersection in NYC
Others are good at capturing the feel of a Hopper, but are jokey in their content, showing scenes that Hopper never would or could have painted. My favorite here:
(#3) Electric car charging: urban night-time scene, with bright lights Hopperesquely picking out the central figure — an EVS charging station, something Hopper probably couldn’t have imagined (a gasoline pump, maybe; a charging station, no)
Some highlights from the Hopper coverage on this blog:
— from 3/23/20, “Mourning Son”, a CGI homage to Edward Hopper’s Morning Sun (1952) by Vadim Temkin
— from 10/17/20, “A tribute to Edward Hopper”: British artist Phil Lockwood paying tribute to Edward Hopper with a compilation of Hopper’s work in a single painting, The Office at Night
— from 12/31/20, “Name that artist”, with early works by Hopper
— from 6/30/21, “Hopper, Woodstock, & LaBelle, on Hopper’s Nighthawks as a parody magnet
February 11, 2025 at 4:15 pm |
“Rain in New York” doesn’t look to me like Hopper, more like Thomas Kinkade.
March 10, 2025 at 5:13 pm |
Waiting for the Train is now listed as “sold out” on Etsy. How does “digital download” sell out? I am no techy here, but I am confused about this. This Hopper is my favorite of all of his work. I hope to find it.
March 11, 2025 at 10:03 am |
In my e-mail his morning, this wonderful note from the Non Museum people:
It used to be a common feature of art education — maybe still is, some places, I’m out of touch with this world now — to have students copy excellent models, and also to create new works (paintings, drawings, sculptures, whatever) in the style of such models. These are immensely useful exercises — and their parallels in writing are also useful (yes, just copying a short story or poem or essay makes you attend to the details of how these things are composed, in surprising ways). Similarly in musical education.
Then, once you’re out in the world, you might want to take these Exercices de style to a new level: creating works inspired by existing works, as homage to them; or creating parodies of existing works or genres, as either affectionate or savage critiques of them. And this can be done using conventional resources, or using AI resources.
I have to add that getting mail from people named Lise and David immediately drew me into David and Lisa, the Theodore Isaac Rubin book (and then the theatrical film, the stage play, and the tv film).
October 26, 2025 at 5:35 am |
I assumed it was a parody when I noticed the digital destination boards hanging up along the platform… Good to have it confirmed.
October 26, 2025 at 5:56 am |
Yes, but parody is the wrong label — it’s not deliberate exaggeration for comic effect, intended as a critique.