writing
Essays on Master Painting
Data-driven essays mining a corpus of 2,491 grounded recreation guides and ten classical art-instruction texts. Plus a running argument for what deliberate practice in painting actually looks like.
AI Painting Teachers Are Mostly Slop. Here's a Version That Isn't.
A close look at what AI painting tutorials actually do, why they fail, and what changes when you ground the model in a real corpus with explicit anti-hallucination discipline.
Read →The 10 Forgotten Books That Teach You to Paint
A working painter's library from 1390 to 1920. The classical instruction texts our recreation guides are built on — and why they're still better than anything written since.
Read →I Analyzed 2,491 Master Paintings to Find the Real Recipe
What every great painting shares — measured across 14,044 painting steps, 728 unique sources, and the actual recreation guides for famous works from Cennini to Sargent.
Read →The 5 Most-Cited Techniques in Master Painting
Five techniques appear under more than 70% of the famous paintings in our corpus. Glazing, scumbling, fat-over-lean, simultaneous contrast, grisaille. Here's what each one actually is and why it became universal.
Read →How Long Does It Really Take to Recreate a Vermeer?
We computed grounded time estimates for 2,491 master paintings. Vermeer is the slowest at 50 hours on average. Munch is the fastest in the top 15. Here's the full distribution.
Read →What "Glazing" Actually Meant — Then vs. Now
Walk into any art-supply store and you'll see "glazing medium" on the shelf. The word survived. The technique it described mostly didn't. Here's what the classical books say it actually is.
Read →The Influence Graph of Western Painting
We mapped who taught whom across 2,189 artists and 1,837 documented influence edges. The hubs aren't who you'd guess. The most-influential painter in our dataset is Raphael, and the most-influenced is a contemporary realist.
Read →Most Painting Tutorials Are Entertainment
A working theory on why the internet's painting content keeps you watching but doesn't make you better — and what we did differently when we built our recreation guides.
Read →What the Atelier System Teaches That Art School Skips
The atelier method built almost every painter in our 2,491-work corpus. Most modern art schools dropped it in the mid-20th century. A look at what was lost and why the atelier is quietly coming back.
Read →Why Copying the Masters Is Back (Done Right)
For three centuries, the way you learned to paint was by reproducing specific master paintings. The 20th century called that unoriginal. The atelier movement and a quieter community of working painters have brought it back.
Read →Deliberate Practice for Painters
Why painting practice usually fails the deliberate-practice test, and what an Anders Ericsson-style training session at the easel might actually look like.
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