Pentimento: Making the First Image Visible Again

Pentimento is the name I’ve chosen for an ongoing body of work that lives between two worlds: the speed of generative images and the slowness of craft.

In art history, a pentimento is the trace of a change — an earlier version of a painting that becomes visible again as the work ages or the layers shift. A hand moves. A contour is corrected. A decision remains, quietly present beneath the surface. It’s not an error. It’s evidence of thinking, revision, and intention.

That idea — the visibility of process — is at the heart of this project.

Why Pentimento now

Generative images can be astonishingly fast. They can also be strangely flat: smooth, polished, and often “averaged” into a kind of generic perfection. They don’t carry the physical signals our eyes and bodies recognise as lived decisions — pressure, drag, grain, resistance, ink density, the way light catches a raised edge or a scraped passage.

In Pentimento, I use AI for what it does best: rapid exploration, variation, and discovery. But I treat the digital image as a beginning, not a conclusion.

The artwork only becomes complete when it enters the world of materials — when it can hold light, weight, texture, and time.

The process: from image to presence

Each piece begins with a digital vision shaped through a custom-trained model and careful curation. I’m not chasing a “final” output from the machine. I’m looking for a spark: an ambiguity, a gesture, a composition that invites longer attention.

From there, I translate the image into physical form using processes such as acrylic glass printing, etching, canvas transfer, painting, and mixed media. The goal is not to “copy” the digital image. The goal is to re-author it materially.

In this translation, something important happens:

• The surface starts to speak.
• The image gains depth and resistance.
• The work becomes sensitive to light and viewing angle.
• The hand re-enters the picture — not as decoration, but as structure.

Where the “pentimento” lives

In traditional painting, pentimenti are the ghost layers of earlier decisions. In this project, the pentimento is the entire relationship between stages: the digital origin remains present, but transformed. It’s a visible lineage.

Sometimes the machine’s suggestion is allowed to show through, like an underpainting. Sometimes it’s interrupted, rewritten, pushed against, or partially erased. Sometimes it becomes a scaffold for paint, imprint, emboss, or incision. The work keeps its history.

That history matters to me because it’s where authorship becomes real.

A collaboration, but not a surrender

I’m interested in what AI can do — and just as interested in what it cannot do.

The machine can generate endlessly, but it does not care about light falling across a physical surface. It does not feel the difference between ink sitting on top of paper and ink pulled into it. It does not understand the quiet authority of a brushstroke, or the way a small imperfection can make an image human.

In Pentimento, AI is not a replacement for craft. It is a catalyst that forces a question:

What is the artist’s contribution, when images are abundant?

My answer is material. It’s time, pressure, revision, and presence.

An invitation to look slowly

These works are designed to reward repeated viewing. They change as you move. They hold traces of their making. They ask you to notice the difference between an image that lives on a screen and an image that has entered matter.

Pentimento is a commitment to that difference — and to the beauty of what remains visible when an artwork has been made, remade, and made real.