Department of Sociology, CUNY Queens College, New York, NY

Naive Art

Generating images in the style of Naive Art.

This post is an installment in the Generative AI Art Style series, a practical knowledge project designed to help content creators fine-tune the aesthetics of their generated images by references to and descriptions of popular art styles.  Click here to read more on the project.

This page depicts the results of mentioning Naive Art in your prompt. Click here to learn about this project

Click here for this visual art style’s Wikipedia page

Generated Thick Descriptor (via Chat-GPT 4): Naïve art is often produced by artists without formal art training and is identifiable by its childlike simplicity. Characteristic features include a disregard for proper perspective, causing a flat, geometric look similar to children’s or medieval artwork. Naïve art typically utilizes strong, unrefined colors through the entire piece, and accurate detail is given equal attention regardless of depth or positioning. This style depicts simplicity in composition rather than subtlety or nuanced complexity.

The table below depicts New York City’s Times Square and Northern Ontario’s Lake Kenogamissi. The left column shows the results of a “thin” prompt, in which the style was requested in name only. The right column shows the results of a “thick” prompt, in which the generated prompt was used.

 ThinThick
Lake
Times Square

These images show what Generative AI renders when one requests that an image be rendered in well-known art styles. This series does not purport to describe major art styles as understood in the art scholarship community. If you have expertise in art and want to explain why these images do or do not capture the essence of these fields, then please do so in the comments section below.