Vincent Van Gogh's Letters to His Brother Theo (Part 1) June 2020

In this series the text originates from Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother, Theo. In total Van Gogh wrote 663 letters to his brother and the letters reveal a story of brotherly love and devotion, as much as they shed a light on Van Gogh’s work.

The first 36 letters were processed to produce a series of images as limited edition inkjet prints on high quality archival paper. Each print is signed and numbered and editions are of 25. Prints are sold unframed and mounted in acid-free mounts or framed and mounted, presented in glazed box frames.

Stage one of the process begins with the original texts, each of which which is uniformly formatted. A generic text to image model is applied (AttnGAN) to produce an image at 256px square. The image is then upscaled to 4096px (or 250mmx250mm) for printing.

The second stage of the process uses a style transfer technique where, the images created from the text are rendered from a small set images of Van Gogh’s own drawings.

Next: Letters to Theo (Part 2)