Announcement: Tiffany Calvert Collaborates with Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis to Create AI-Inspired Still Life Paintings
Tiffany Calvert, the chair of WashU’s MFA in Visual Art program, is breaking new ground in the art world by combining historical still life painting techniques with cutting-edge AI technology. Through a collaboration with engineers at Washington University in St. Louis, Calvert has developed a custom AI diffusion model that adds a modern twist to her traditionally inspired artwork.
Calvert’s interest in merging old and new techniques has led her to explore historical traditions in a contemporary context. She explains, “I chose abstract painting as a mode on purpose — its intention is to interrupt an image and make it harder to look at, so you have to think about your own process of looking.”
Since 2014, Calvert has been focusing on Dutch and Flemish still life paintings, which she finds to be incredibly detailed and abstract in nature. To create her artwork, she collected 650 images of still life paintings from online archives and input them into a StyleGAN. This generative adversarial network generated still life images that served as a starting point for Calvert’s paintings, where she adds abstract layers on top of the original images.
However, Calvert faced a challenge when the program she was using changed its protocol upon her arrival at WashU in 2024. In need of technical assistance, she turned to a team of WashU engineers who were developing a custom diffusion model. This model allowed for more precise control over smaller data sets, like Calvert’s set of 650 images, resulting in higher accuracy and the creation of truly new images.
Calvert expresses her gratitude for the interdisciplinary research opportunities at WashU, stating, “I was so happy to be at WashU at that moment, because there is real intent and motivation behind putting together teams for interdisciplinary research.” To learn more about Calvert’s groundbreaking collaboration with WashU engineers and the innovative AI twist in her still life paintings, visit samfoxschool.washu.edu.
