Art For Art's Fake

Late last night, Wilhelm alerted me to an internet fad that's apparently been all over Twitter for a couple of weeks. Not that I'd know. I'm not one of the Twitterati. 

Maybe I should have known, even so. When I followed the links, first to the version of Dall-E that Wilhelm favors and thence to Craiyon, its new home, I realised the whole thing was part of something I already have bookmarked, the GPT-3 Demo Showcase.

As with a lot of aggregators, there's just too much to wade through there. Over three hundred AI-related apps using the GPT-3 large language module made publicly available by Open AI last year. I'd been riffling through a few of them in idle moments, playing around with various "writing assistants" and chatbots, but I'd been under the impression everything there was purely textual.

It seems not. Craiyon is an "AI model that can draw images from any text prompt", something like the Artflow app we all had so much fun with a few months back. Except that where Artflow only generates portraits, Craiyon attempts to visualize anything you suggest. 

It's not content with a single try, either. Craiyon gives you nine different versions in a classic comic-book grid, something which creates, in my mind at least, an almost subliminal expectation of some kind of narrative progression. It adds to the general surrealism of the process, as if it wasn't surreal enough already.

Even though it was late, I couldn't resist playing about with the thing right way. I did a couple of runs at the Dall-E Mini site before moving to Craiyon, beginning with this one:

 

I wasn't entirely convinced. Most of the shots look a lot like Tony the Tiger but not much like they've been drawn by Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. #7 looks something like Hobbes. I'm not sure any of the others do.

I was curious as to why several of the shots have distorted, almost cubist faces. Nothing in the seed should have suggested it. As things progressed it became obvious at least a degree of facial distortion was just about guaranteed, no matter what seed was used. I still don't know why. Maybe the AI's on something.

Still on the tiger trail, I tried Shere Khan next. Once again, I couldn't really see much - or any - of Bill Watterson's influence in the result. I started to wonder whether Craiyon really knew who Bill Watterson was or what his drawings looked like. Of that, more later.

There followed a very unsuccessful series of attempts featuring Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Gidget. In only one was either of them even vaguely recognizeable. This one.

 

The AI seems to think "various" means "identical" but it's very keen to prove it knows what a witch is. In # 4 it seems to have given Sabrina two hats to wear and by the last frame it has at least managed to come up with a color other than black. Still, not very impressive.

 

Back to the drawing board, by which I mean more cartoon characters. I was wearing my Stience T-shirt so Bean from Disenchantment was the first one I thought of.

It seems that being the lead character in a successful Matt Groening animated series is no more a passport to fame than landing a long-running role as the face of a once-feted mmorpg. The AI had no more idea who Bean was than it recognized Firiona Vie's name when Wilhelm pointed it in that direction. Of course, the fact that I got the name of the show wrong (As I nearly always do.) might have had something to do with it. 

 

[Edit: I just reseeded it with the correct name and got this:

My apologies to the AI. I am an idiot.]

It clearly knew what a  kite was, anyway, so I tried again with someone I thought was bound to be famous enough to be pictured flying one: Elvis. 

I really like those. It's nice to see Elvis looking so happy. 

 

Since the AI was clearly at home with Elvis, I thought I'd give it a chance to show off. It was plain from Wilhelm's post that one of the app's great strengths was cloning the signature styles of famous artists. If Bill Watterson wasn't famous enough, how about Banksy? The internet loves Banksy.

Wow! That's just about perfect. It would make a great poster. Or a mural.

It was at this point that I had a brainwave. Maybe Craiyon didn't know who Bill Watterson was but how about his most famous creations? How would it be if I asked it to draw Elvis not in the style of Bill Watterson but in the style of Calvin and Hobbes?

Oh boy. It loves Calvin and Hobbes! So much so that it barely remembered to put Elvis in at all. That's not "Elvis in the style of Calvin and Hobbes" so much as Calvin and Hobbes with a very brief cameo by the King.

Since Craiyon was so into them, I gave it another chance to indulge itself.

 

 

Apart from the distortion, those are very good fakes. It wouldn't be all that hard to add some speech bubbles and turn them into a strip. It's easy to see the potential for mischief, something Calvin might love but I'm pretty sure Bill Watterson wouldn't.

 

I thought maybe it was time to move away from cartoon characters and copyrighted material. Since Elvis worked so well, how about a couple more rock stars?

 

I didn't specify "...during a pandemic" but Craiyon decided to add masks anyway. Other than that it's a mind-blowingly accurate visual record of an incident that never happened and probably never could have happened. I'm particularly impressed by the way it correctly interprets the preposition in all but two of the pictures.

Time to step down hard on the surreality pedal. I'd been keeping my texts short and to the point. I decided to go long and complicated instead.

Once again, I was impressed. "Ann of Cleves" doesn't feature but then I did spell her name wrong. I guess you can't tell it's a Thursday, either, or what they're talking about, but it's definitely night-time, they're obviously having a discussion and that could as well be The Factory as anyplace else. The rabbits, the monkey, Nico and Andy are all clearly recognisable, even if facial distortion is at an all-time high.

It freaked me out a bit. It's like set of contact negatives from a photo-shoot for Interview magazine, one that was judged too disturbing to publish. It was getting properly late by then so I decided to call it a night before things got any weirder.

This afternoon, just before I started on this post, I ran a couple more ideas past Craiyon. Rather than leave you with the unsettling images above, here's something decidedly more cheery. And colorful. Boy, is it colorful!

 

Doesn't that have a weird Rembrandt/Vermeer feel to it? Ferris looks as if he's wearing a ruff in #2 and a cassock in #7. There's an awful lot of Scooby and not so much of the gang. I can make out Daphne in #3 and Velma in #5, I think, but if Fred or Shaggy are in there anywhere, I'm afraid I can't see them.

 

Saved the best for last there. I'd have that on my wall, blown up to poster size. That and the Banksy. I love the way Scooby seems to be wearing clothes in most of his shots.

As I said about Artflow, this would really integrate wonderfully with Occupy White Walls. I really ought to look into that. I think it might be doable. Whether or not it would be legal is another matter altogether.

"Honestly, This Writer Blows..."

There's a post from AI Weirdness about AI-generated April Fools' pranks in the blog roll today. It links to a another post and that post links to a website called talktotransformer.com and that goes to something called InferKit, which is a free demo. I thought it might be amusing to have it guest-write today's post.

You get 10,000 free characters a week. I set it to the maximum per attempt, one thousand, gave it a draft version of the opening paragraph above and let it roll.

The result was utterly bizarre. It was all about tennis, a detailed report of certain named players' histories and standings. I wiped that, fiddled with some settings, then tried again. This time I asked for something about video games and music and television.

This is what I got.

Hey, anyone remember years ago, it felt like years ago but was probably just 5 years ago, the long Game Boy advertisement with the creepy ringtone, the one after the title? Well, if not, it went a little something like this: "When it comes to Japanese video games, do you work to live, or die to live?"

Super Mario Land 2 Mario’s mastered everything he knew about being a Badass, you might say. But life is a bitch, you know!

Oh, that’s right, that’s what Call of Duty doesn’t get.

In this game there’s no survivors. You land on the bottom screen of the screen, and before you can use your fancy hand cannons or your righteous fists, Bowser appears on the moving screen.

“Well, well! I see someone’s pulled their dad’s minivan into my stage! How rude.” He swiftly moves to the sound effects menu: “BANG!” BOOM! BANG! BANG! “DISGUSTING!” “I HATE you!”

Oh yeah, pretty personal stuff there. Bowser’s got a thing against children, or something.

DO YOU EVER WANT TO RUN INTO MY LAWN AND TELL ME TO SHUT THE HELL UP? WHAT AM I, A GOON?

Hey, were you just listening to some bad music? Because I’m here to ensure that not only your ears, but also your joystick, are sufficiently dented by Bowser’s deathsticks.

I think Bowser would be a good foil for Ghostbusters. Think about it: a famous ghost has to contend with the ghosts of each mode’s Mario.

Excellent. Next, my friends are supposed to break into the attic level where the ghosts are congregating for protection.

THINGS ARE GETTING BIGGER, BRAINS!

Pause the movie!

It’s a very big bother trying to write all of these horror movie posters, no one can seem to keep up with the continuity. Let me put my hand up: I once saw the Shrubman family wandering through a cornfield for no reason whatsoever. And I thought I was hallucinating. But now, I can’t go downstairs in my apartment because Dr. Moreau’s trying to lure and devour me.

It really doesn’t matter what this movie does, though, as long as Dr. Moreau traps the wild toads in there too and makes all the houseboarders their dinner…
THINGS ARE GONNA GET BIG, EYEE!

I don’t think Krillin liked being psychoanalyzed. You know what, he probably liked it, so take the air horns off there.

The pace of this level is very fast: you have to punch a whole lot of ghosts in a short period of time, which is a real departure from most of the game: you’re normally sat around sipping Super Mushroom juice and reading otome.

“I can read if I wanna, thank you very much.”

Now that’s respect. In addition to the justifications your girlfriend may have given you prior, keeping a dark poster open with morbid illustrations helps out too. Can’t believe I ever fought you for this.

Cool story, bro, but did my ego really need a stroke? Haven’t you moved on to better things, like drawing stick figures while using your Daemon Powers?

Also: “We aren’t necessarily in the business of coercing people into joining our DYNAMITE TIN POT.”

What? Can’t they just go on holiday at the same time as me? Or shorten work hours so I can spend more time with them?

Honestly, this writer blows, I can’t believe it. I mean, check out this form I filled out: “I’m a complete wussy for Capcom USA’s initial English dubbing of Resident Evil 2. But give me that English dub of this sequel with the voice overs by two guys sitting in rubber doughnut chairs who were so good that their roles were immediately recast (Amadio, Anderson, Sjoklany).” You can go on as long as you want, ’cause you’re doing a poor job of proving this stuff just makes you seem like an eccentric old fart in a virtual world.

This section has about three hours of legless Mario to it. Damn straight!

I know, I understand your pain. Just get yourself one of those crutches and a note saying you tried out for Cheers and didn’t get it.

Wow, what a downer.

Right. I tried to buy Roy Mustang’s real name on an episode of Millennium Quake, but I missed the deadline. We should probably sue the...

And that's about enough of that.

To get a coherent piece long enough for a post, I cut and pasted the first thousand characters and fed it back in as the seed for the second thousand, then used the two thousand character result as the seed for the third. Each section follows on seamlessly from the one before but as you read the whole thing you can sense the degradation of logic and meaning as the AI feeds on itself.

I thought the post probably needed some illustrations so I fired up our old friend Artflow and put in a few choice phrases from the piece. The results were distinctly underwhelming so I googled "free ai image generators" and tried a few.

It wasn't much of an improvement. Or indeed any improvement. Mostly they were useless. Eventually I got one or two I was willing to use. The four-legged oyster catcher is nightmare fuel but at least there's a cute puppy.

I did think of just putting the AI-generated text and images up as a post without explanation or comment as an actual April Fool's joke but I'm not really fond of those so instead, in the zeitgeisty spirit of talking about talking about things instead of actually talking about them (I stole that from something I read yesterday. I think it was in one of the Atlantic articles. It's good, isn't it?), here's a post about April's Fools jokes that's not in itself an April Fool's joke even though it kind of is.

Enjoy!

Hey, anyone remember years ago, it felt like years ago but was probably just 5 years ago, the long Game Boy advertisement with the creepy ringtone, the one after the title? Well, if not, it went a little something like this: "When it comes to Japanese video games, do you work to live, or die to live?" Super Mario Land 2 Mario’s mastered everything he knew about being a Badass, you might say. But life is a bitch, you know! Oh, that’s right, that’s what Call of Duty doesn’t get. In this game there’s no survivors. You land on the bottom screen of the screen, and before you can use your fancy hand cannons or your righteous fists, Bowser appears on the moving screen. “Well, well! I see someone’s pulled their dad’s minivan into my stage! How rude.” He swiftly moves to the sound effects menu: “BANG!” BOOM! BANG! BANG! “DISGUSTING!” “I HATE you!” Oh yeah, pretty personal stuff there. Bowser’s got a thing against children, or something. DO YOU EVER WANT TO RUN INTO MY LAWN AND TELL ME TO SHUT THE HELL UP? WHAT AM I, A GOON? Hey, were you just listening to some bad music? Because I’m here to ensure that not only your ears, but also your joystick, are sufficiently dented by Bowser’s deathsticks. I think Bowser would be a good foil for Ghostbusters. Think about it: a famous ghost has to contend with the ghosts of each mode’s Mario. Excellent. Next, my friends are supposed to break into the attic level where the ghosts are congregating for protection. THINGS ARE GETTING BIGGER, BRAINS! Pause the movie! It’s a very big bother trying to write all of these horror movie posters, no one can seem to keep up with the continuity. Let me put my hand up: I once saw the Shrubman family wandering through a cornfield for no reason whatsoever. And I thought I was hallucinating. But now, I can’t go downstairs in my apartment because Dr. Moreau’s trying to lure and devour me. It really doesn’t matter what this movie does, though, as long as Dr. Moreau traps the wild toads in there too and makes all the houseboarders their dinner… THINGS ARE GONNA GET BIG, EYEE! I don’t think Krillin liked being psychoanalyzed. You know what, he probably liked it, so take the air horns off there. The pace of this level is very fast: you have to punch a whole lot of ghosts in a short period of time, which is a real departure from most of the game: you’re normally sat around sipping Super Mushroom juice and reading otome. “I can read if I wanna, thank you very much.” Now that’s respect. In addition to the justifications your girlfriend may have given you prior, keeping a dark poster open with morbid illustrations helps out too. Can’t believe I ever fought you for this. Cool story, bro, but did my ego really need a stroke? Haven’t you moved on to better things, like drawing stick figures while using your Daemon Powers? Also: “We aren’t necessarily in the business of coercing people into joining our DYNAMITE TIN POT.” What? Can’t they just go on holiday at the same time as me? Or shorten work hours so I can spend more time with them? Honestly, this writer blows, I can’t believe it. I mean, check out this form I filled out: “I’m a complete wussy for Capcom USA’s initial English dubbing of Resident Evil 2. But give me that English dub of this sequel with the voice overs by two guys sitting in rubber doughnut chairs who were so good that their roles were immediately recast (Amadio, Anderson, Sjoklany).” You can go on as long as you want, ’cause you’re doing a poor job of proving this stuff just makes you seem like an eccentric old fart in a virtual world. This section has about three hours of legless Mario to it. Damn straight! I know, I understand your pain. Just get yourself one of those crutches and a note saying you tried out for Cheers and didn’t get it. Wow, what a downer. Right. I tried to buy Roy Mustang’s real name on an episode of Millennium Quake, but I missed the deadline. We should probably sue the

Nine Pictures

I did warn you this would happen. It's eight in the evening, I haven't even logged in to do my Guild Wars 2 dailies yet, let alone anything more interesting and yet I still don't want to skip a day, so here comes something I prepared earlier. Although "prepared" may  be stretching a point a little.

I was curious how Artflow would interpret some of my favorite fictional characters. My first attempt, which was more of a title than a character, came out rather well, if you think Uncle Wiggly was an elderly fisherman rather than an elderly rabbit. Also I just now realize I spelled his name wrong.

After that debacle I tried just putting in the character names but I didn't much like the results. Then it occured to me to try adding the name of an artist to use their style as a kind of filter. The AI seems pretty well-versed in that sort of thing.

I had a brief think about who I could try. I'd already done a few pop stars as they might look if David Hockney had done their portraits, as indeed he could easily have done but I for some reason the AI seemed to think Hockney's defining trope was making people look like they'd fallen asleep in the Californian sun while lounging around the pool in his Los Angelean home.

That didn't seem like it was going to work for the pasty, New York intellectuals I had in mind. I toyed with Warhol but it seemed a little too on the nose. Rothko seemed like he might be interesting but only in a metaphysical fashion. I couldn't see how it would actually bring anything to the experiment other than another color wash.

While I was trying to come up with something better, Roy Lichtenstein popped into my mind, as he so often does if I start thinking randomly about art. Not that I'm a particular fan of his work or even of Pop Art in general, although obviously I like it well enough, who doesn't? It's more that he's so brash and loud he tends to push his way to the front.

I took a couple of shots at it to see what popped up and they weren't at all bad. They might have been even better if I'd spelled the artist's name right. I sense a theme developing here...

I find it fascinating how consistent they are. They really do look as though they'd been painted by the same artist. I'm not sure that artist would be Roy Lichtenstein but I guess it could have been Roy Leichtenstein.

They didn't look anything like the versions of the characters in my head, though. Phoebe is too old and also far too sophisticated. Seymour looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger in drag. Holden looks the best of the three but I always imagined him to be a lot thinner in the face. The hair and the sullen, defeated-yet-confrontational expression are pretty close, though.

Just then, probably because I'd been talking about her earlier that day, I thought of Cindy Sherman. At this point I'd dearly love to just let that lie there while I bask in it. I'd love to be thought of the kind of person who has casual conversations about Cindy Sherman over afternoon tea. 

What actually happened was that Mrs Bhagpuss and I watched an old episode of Pointless on YouTube and there was a question where you had to name a female American photographer from a picture. Not one of her pictures, a picture of her.  I've already forgotten who it was. It might have been Dorothea Lange. I know at the time I could only think of Diane Arbus and I knew it wasn't her. 

Anyway, it started me thinking about Cindy Sherman, who I like enough to have a picture by, up on the wall in a room downstairs, cut out of a magazine and snap-framed about a quarter of a century ago. I figured she'd be worth a try.

Yeah... kinda.

As you can see I went all out for accuracy and consistency in the seeds and I damn well got it, too. What I don't think I really got, once again, were either the characters or the artist as I'd imagined them. 

I can see a touch of Cindy Sherman in the shots of Phoebe and Franny. There's a hint of that processed color I like about some of her stuff. The backgrounds also seem to have some redolence of what I remember about her work in a certain period, although I suppose that's just pure chance.

Phoebe's too old again. I think I'd have to specify her age to get anything remotely close. Other than that, and especially if she wiped off that lipstick, she's not too far out of line. Franny looks closer to my idea of her, Cindy Sherman or not, and Zooey isn't far off, either. Seymour is at least possible. I don't have a super-strong image of him to begin with, although I see him as well-built and solid with a more traditionally masculine look than the rest of the Glass family. This version is that, at least.

I can't say I have any particular notion what Buddy might look like except he sure as hell wouldn't look like he does here, where he reminds me of Hugh Laurie playing the role of a supercilious officer in a movie about the War Between the States. Not sure which side he'd be on. Maybe he's not, either.

Holden, I think, looks less like himself than he did under Lichtenstein's influence. He looks like a young Dean Martin caught in the middle of removing his stage makeup. He's got that worn-down, ready to give up look again, which is right, but this time he doesn't seem to have the energy left to be belligerent.

Anyway, there you have it, for what it's worth. Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I might just have enough time before bed to get those dailies done.

I'm working again tomorrow so I may very well have to trot out the results of my attempts to actualize the main cast of C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories. There's something to look forward to, eh?

I'm Ready For My Close-Up Now, Computer.

You can thank Tipa for this post. And Grimes. I already had half a mind (Quiet at the back!) to do something with the Grimes story when Tipa's post popped up on my blog roll. Go synchronicity!

The news that everyone's favorite/least favorite (Delete as applicable) posthuman (Or is that transhuman? I can never remember the difference.) has started an all-girl group (Grimes' description, not mine.) made up entirely of AIs and named it NPC seemed so on point for this blog as not to be ignorable, even though it turns out, when you drill down into the detail, the AIs are "not sentient" (Thanks for clearing that up, Grimes!) and the music is not, as yet, being created entirely by nonhumans. 

I think that might be the most overwritten paragraph in the history of Inventory Full but I feel confident you'll find it parses correctly. I love to parse! Go me!

NPC already have a song out. Well, Grimes and Chris Lake have a song they've released under the NPC brand. It's pretty spiffy, too, although the chant super-reminds me of something... 

 

The actual AIs aren't quite ready for their public yet for the extraordinary reason that "photos of the group weren’t ready yet because “we’re stuck on making their faces”"

Enter Artflow to the rescue. Artflow, as Tipa explains, is a website where "you type in a description of the portrait you want, and out comes a portrait of someone who never was."

The site itself is the most minimal thing you've ever seen. Absolutely no explanation of anything at all. Just the bare instruction "Describe your avatar and click Generate.", a box to type into and a button marked "Generate" to make the magic happen. 

There is more detail if you look for it. I recommend reading the whole thing. It answered a few questions I had, such as where the AI draws the images from and what the reproduction rights are. In sharp contrast to all the nonsense NFT talk we've been having, anything you generate using Artflow is "is licensed under the most accommodating Creative Commons license **CC BY** that allows both commercial and non-commercial use, including derivative work, as long as you attribute Artflow."

Perhaps more worryingly, considering my propensity to keep making versions of one celebrity in the guise of another, "This does not however cover the right to use someone's likeness for other than editorial use... You take full responsibility for both the provided content (including uploaded images, text and other media) as well as generated content that could be considered offensive, obscene, libellous or in any other way violating the law." So don't say you weren't warned.

I spent several hours typing stuff into Artflow last night. I'm warning you now that if you start playing with this thing you won't want to stop. 

The most fun part for me is watching my mind spontaneously concatenate fragments into phrases. I do
it all the time as I write but this thing just fires up all those synapses. I started off with the very obvious "My favorite person pretending to be my favorite character" but pretty quickly wandered off the predictable path into the deep forests of the subconscious.

Where "Lonely lighthouse keeper missing her cats" or "submarine commander having a moment of self-doubt as painted by one of the pre-raphaelites" came from is my therapist's guess. (I don't have a therapist, just for clarity, although I'd perfectly amenable to having one under appropriate circumstances.)

The next most fun part is waiting to see what the AI makes of the input. That's what turns the whole thing into a game. In fact, I can immediately see how this could be turned into an actual game, something I'm sure someone is doing right now, especially since the exceptionally generous license allows for commercial use.

The game would work like Pictionary, with people typing in their seed phrases and everyone trying to guess what they'd said, based on the result. Sometimes it would be very obvious. Some of mine came out looking almost exactly like I'd imagined. Others, however, were head-scratchingly odd.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald if he'd been an actor in My Own Private Idaho", for example, looks almost exactly I'd hoped it would. "Sylvia Plath as the handmaiden of the Goddess Selene", however, came out looking so incredibly unlike Sylvia Plath I had to go look at a whole bunch of actual photographs of her to see where it had gone wrong. 

And in the end I could see it. It's there in the jaw-line and the mouth and the shape of the skull. This thing isn't just making stuff up at random. It's smart.

Some of the results were just perfect. I really love this tryptych, which I did in quick succession. Either I or Artflow was really on a roll there.

The Marilyn is absolutely 100% spot on for the seed phrase. The Janis really does look like her, especially about the eyes, and the schoolmarm vibe is undeniable. The Kate Bush one looks nothing like her but it's just infectiously joyous. You can all but see the puppy. Makes me happy every time I look at it.

For every "Yes!" there was a "What?!" Sometimes I got the impression the AI simply had no idea what I was talking about.

Allowing for traditional gender stereotypes, I think Liam there looks more like a young boy than a young girl. As for Supergirl, I can see Melissa Benoist in there, somewhere, but if we were playing that game I mentioned, I'd be willing to bet my house on no-one getting Viet Cong. I certainly can't see it. As for Daria, well, it's perfectly clear Artflow has no clue who that is, although evidently it knows its Tennessee Williams.

The ones that don't work out are fun but it's the ones where it really works that send shivers down my spine. These next three are supernaturally accurate.

For some inexplicable reason I had The Addams Family on my brain last night, which inevitably brought the Munsters into play as well. "Uncle Fester's Sister"came out almost exactly as you'd expect, except she wasn't bald. Artflow doesn't seem to like baldness. I noticed other people had managed to get some naked scalps but only by specifying the word "bald" in the seed phrase. I thought it would be a given that anything based off Uncle Fester or Telly Savalas would come without hair but evidently not.

Towards the end I felt the results were starting to get a little... peculiar. Disturbing, even. These three make for a real rogues' gallery. I guess that's what you expect when you bring R. Crumb onboard and anything involving Zelda was always going to be risky. The evil martian turned out surprisingly cute, though.

On the topic of expectations, prepare for more of these portraits from paradise (or purgatory). I suspect Artflow may turn out to be my replacement for the Pitchfork 25 posts, something I can cobble together quickly or prepare in advance and stack up for future use. I know I'm saving every single picture and I can't see why I wouldn't want to share. I'm going to have to do something about the white backgrounds, though. Too jarring.

I do hope this takes off as a bit of a blogosphere trend, at least for a week or two. As Tipa said, I’d love to see what you come up with. Let's end with some of my favorites that I haven't already used.

Serge there, looking disturbingly like both himself and a deceased friend of mine. Millicent, so knowing. Dean in his prime, although I'm not quite sure about the Picasso. Almost a touch of the Lucian Freud about it, I'd say.

Hmm. Lucian Freud. Now there's an idea.