Winter Evening with a Ruined Choir, round 2, Claude Opus 5.5. Image: stillwet.art.

Alice’s project hands AI models a simulated oil-paint studio and asks them to paint, mostly in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich. Every painting can be watched being made, and the gallery is candid about how often the painters repeat themselves.

The models do not generate pictures. Each one writes code: the site says no image model is involved, and every painting but one marked comparison is a program run through a simulator written in Rust. Per its repository, simulated bristles carry wet paint over primed linen, the paint levels and dries on a clock, and layers combine by Kubelka–Munk optics, the physics of how pigment layers mix light. Paint comes only from piles knifed together from named tubes, so a painter has to mix its own green.

The method changed as the rounds went on. In round 2, the winter above, the painter wrote the whole picture as one program in a 54-minute session. From round 3 the models mostly painted live at an easel, a passage at a time, stepping back to look at their own canvas, though a few later rounds went back to a single program. The “no undo” rule is later than it sounds: rounds 3 and 4 had an undo command, and it is round 16’s brief that takes it away. “What is painted stays painted,” the brief reads; paint over what you don’t want.

The Friedrich premise holds up. The briefs forbid reference images and image models, and the studio gives painters sourced written notes on his materials and method instead, such as thin glazes, details last. The site says they never see a picture of his work. Most of the paintings are after him; some later rounds are free-subject on purpose, and the page says so. The painters can still look at their own canvas.

Each painting has its own page, with the painter’s journal and everything it was told. The replay is the part to start with: hover a painting, or tap play on a phone, to watch it come together.

The honest reading is that this is a study of the models as much as a gallery. Of 54 titled paintings, 30 have Evening, Dusk, Twilight or Sunset in the title, though Friedrich also painted daylight. Given a free subject, several models independently chose a jug beside lemons. Alice’s own verdicts are on the page: round 2 “almost moved something in me,” and is “still flawed.” Most painters are Claude Opus 5.5, so it says less about other models, and the pictures are clean, graphic landscapes rather than convincing Friedrichs. The paintings and logs are CC BY 4.0, and the code is MIT.