Camille Pissarro's great-great-grandson is making new Pissarros, with AI and by hand
Radical Genealogy: an edition of one hundred oil paintings in the late style of Camille Pissarro.
The story
RAD-GEN.001 began in 2026 with a studio visit. Mike Mozart walked Paul Pissarro and Jesse Do through his studio and showed them work he had made in series. It reminded Pissarro of something his family has long carried: Camille Pissarro came to the series only at the very end of his life, with the Rouen bridges and the Paris boulevards he painted from hotel windows. He died in 1903, just as the form was opening up for him, and some of his best paintings come from those last years.
Radical Genealogy picks up there. Radical Genealogy (RAD-GEN.001, 2026), the series that takes the method’s name, is one hundred oil paintings in the manner of late Pissarro, each 30.5 by 30.5 cm, built around moments that resist being held: golden hour, the last warmth of a day, the pause at the end of a long one. A photograph can record that light, but it can't keep it. A painting can. The project's statement of method: "the lineage is the medium."
Each work begins as a generated study. Camille Pissarro's corpus is unusually well documented, and the series works from digital photographs of those paintings to draw new unions out of them. Paul Pissarro and Jesse Do worked together to generate the studies, driven by a visual model trained on the elder Pissarro's own body of work. The study is carried onto stretched canvas, and Kim Van Do paints it again by hand, in oil. When photography moved from document to art, people learned to see a machine and a human hand as one craft. This edition asks for that same eye.
Every canvas passes through three public states, pre-study, study and finished, and the project site is a live ledger showing each one. Two of the hundred, № 001 and № 002, are the artists' proofs and are not for sale; the remaining ninety-eight are available. A $700 deposit reserves a work, with the $7,000 total due before the finished painting is delivered. Each work is governed by the CoCA resale covenant, running with the object in perpetuity: fifty per cent of any resale value above $14,000 remits to the artists.
Paul-Alexander Pissarro is a conceptual artist in London and the sixth generation of working Pissarro artists and scholars. The edition is produced under his direction with Wolf Mike Mozart (MiMo); Jesse Do is technical supervisor. For a deep dive, the live ledger: rad-gen001.unsubscribe.llc
Fast facts
- Edition of one hundred; oil on canvas, 30.5 × 30.5 cm; 2026
- Studies generated with a visual model trained on Camille Pissarro's own corpus; each painting executed by hand, in oil, by Kim Van Do
- № 001 and № 002 are the artists' proofs, not for sale; ninety-eight works available
- $700 deposit reserves a work; $7,000 total per work, through Name of My Gallery
- CoCA resale covenant: fifty per cent of resale value above $14,000 to the artists, in perpetuity
- Issued by the Church of Conceptual Art; first work in the RAD-GEN (Radical Genealogy) series
- Live ledger at rad-gen001.unsubscribe.llc tracks every canvas: pre-study, study, finished
Images
Links
- paulpissarro.com/portfolio, the works
- rad-gen001.unsubscribe.llc, the deep dive: the edition painting by painting
- Name of My Gallery, acquisitions
Contact
Paul-Alexander Pissarro, London. Interviews, high-resolution images and further material: paul@paulpissarro.com