- Countering autumn gloom with the vibrant colours of David Hockney.
- Feeding "landscape" and "vibrant colours" prompts into Stable Diffusion.
- Roughly 20 generations later: fascination, frustration and a slot-machine reward loop.
- No personal "Hockney" — but an enchanting, happy session all the same.
Let the machine do the magic. The silent rain of mid-September is drizzling the summer out of my system. Let's counter the autumn gloom and absorb the vibrant colours of British artist David Hockney. The starting point today is wonderful 'Nichols Canyon', a residential area in the beloved Californian sunlight of Los Angeles. As a matter of fact, I am staring at the poster version of the 1988 work David Hockney created for his retrospective in the MOMA of New York.
Starting point: Nichols Canyon
It pictures Nichols Canyon with the vivid colours, characteristic semi-abstraction, and optimism which make the work of David Hockney so recognisable, full of joy and immensely popular. It's easy to imagine yourself picking peaches and strawberries there. It is like the hidden promise of the image. It celebrates the sun and the heat, keeping our attention and focus in a moment without time. The omnipresent summer light is vibrating optimism and life.
Into Stable Diffusion
Looking at Nichols Canyon makes me hungry for more. Time to hit the magic of Stable Diffusion. I entered "landscape" and "vibrant colors" as a constant in the various prompts. Curiosity also led me to try out some seeds as published on Lexica, a search engine for Stable Diffusion images and prompts. Search results also show images with the same seed. Copying the prompt and the url, or exploring the style, digs deeper into the rabbit hole of over 10 million images. Be warned.
For this round of newly generated David Hockney landscapes, I found a very helpful and highly effective cheat sheet, drafted by postdoctoral researcher Moritz Wolter.
To cut a long story short, the vibrance of the colours on the screen made this low-level prompter happy to be alive. The speed and quantity of the variations are mind blowing.
Overall, the output created enough fascination and frustration to keep me going for a couple of hours. You got it: a rather addictive experience by 'an unpredictable reward system', much like a slot machine.
The results
I had Stable Diffusion generate about 20 landscape variations. Let's look at the most satisfying ones.
I started off with a first prompt. In my opinion the result is very promising, if not very detailed and … where are the clouds? But a good start and a little weird. It's a keeper.
Prompt: colourful landscape, summer light, trees with winding road and river in the background, with clouds on bright blue sky, digital art, David Hockney, 1988.
The next couple of generations had me biting through rather soulless impressions of red winding roads, childish clouds and seasonless trees. But the next round of prompts — with the same seed and number of steps — was precious. The composition is a pass in art school. There are some imperfections, such as the blues of the sky and the partial transparency. But there's also a slight hesitation of a shadow in the foreground. Somehow it adds to the mystery, and it captures the interest in what's going on. It's incomplete and leaves the viewer to colour their own story.
Prompt: stunning trees with winding river in a vibrant colourful landscape, with clouds on bright blue sky, summer light in the background, digital art, David Hockney.
A more refined variation would be more to popular taste. Using the 'roll' option, Stable Diffusion added the input of several artists. The output is pleasing: the finish is more detailed, the style a little more refined. I am conflicted because although the outcome is more complete, that doesn't necessarily make it more interesting. In the blink of an eye, anyone might pick this one up in the thrift store.
So far, the server has been up and running. In case of emergency, the Hugging Face platform throws a lifeline. It is delightful to try the Stable Diffusion demo there.
Conclusion
This session was a roller coaster. Most likely, artistic genius David Hockney would be amused by the output so far. It is fair to say, I didn't get my personal "David Hockney". However, this session of Stable Diffusion generations was enchanting and happy, good fun. And who knows, David Hockney himself might be giving it a try right now.