What makes a way
of seeing unique?
Your favorite classic artists, reimagined through the ideas that make us look closer.
Find your way in ↓
Every artist leaves
a world of connections.
A color beside another. A contour that carries a whole landscape. A soft edge that lets the air in. The Artist Genome Project is Arthaus’s research into how we describe, connect and experiment with those choices.
“Genome” is our metaphor for a connected vocabulary of artistic ideas. Historical sources and close looking give those ideas context; digital painting experiments help us ask what they can do. Academy is where you can explore that work through films, original paintings and stories.
Whose eyes will you look through?
Choose an artist. Follow an idea into the films.
Look through the air.
Follow Leonardo’s interest in observation: distant blues, soft transitions and the passage from light into shadow. Watch those ideas become questions to try on a new landscape.
Meet Leonardo da Vinci ↗A QUESTION TO TAKE WITH YOUWhere does an edge disappear?
These are curated learning paths, informed by the sources above. They are not live knowledge-graph results or a claim that an artist’s entire style has been captured.
Follow the thread.
- 01 / DISCOVER
Begin with the artist.
Read letters, notebooks and scholarship. Keep historical evidence, interpretation and invented dialogue clearly identified.
- 02 / CONNECT
Give an idea context.
Connect an artist, a work, a technique and its sources. The knowledge graph organizes these relationships; the research asks which can become useful painting controls.
- 03 / MAKE
Build a digital painting.
Pigment, Arthaus’s experimental painting engine, constructs images with stored digital brush instructions. Its research controls apply to specific works and experiments.
- 04 / EXPLORE
Open up the story.
Watch an episode, look through its painting stages and follow its source notes. Bring a question back to the next painting you see.
A painting you can look into.
Begin with Split Rock Lighthouse. Follow the recorded construction, then explore the full painting and its evidence.
Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci The painting chapters show recorded digital brush marks. The artist portrayal and film presentation are separate from the stored painting instructions.
A project built
on curiosity.
We can record and replay a digital painting’s construction. We are still researching how well source-supported ideas describe an artist’s practice, transfer to new compositions and help people discover art.
A successful replay verifies the stored instructions. It does not recover a historical artist’s gestures or establish that we have captured their complete style. The films are creative interpretations, with original paintings inspired by the artists.
Here on Academy, the artist connections are curated. A live, interactive knowledge-graph explorer is a future part of this project.
A film is just
the beginning.
Watch the stories on TikTok. Stay here for the paintings, the ideas and the artists behind the inspiration.