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A team of European scientists unveiled a new method for extracting images hidden under old masters' paintings, and demonstrated by recreating a color portrait of a woman's face unseen since Vincent van Gogh painted over it in 1887. Now all those great art choices can be undone!

The new approach was used on "Patch of Grass," a small oil study of a field that Van Gogh painted in Paris while living with his brother Theo. While not exact in every detail, the image produced is a woman's head that may be the same model Van Gogh painted in a series of portraits leading up to the 1885 masterpiece "The Potato Eaters." The sale line is this new method will allow art historians to obtain higher quality and more detailed images underlying old masterpieces. In Van Gogh's case, "it could reveal details of works that were painted over. For other works, it could provide new insights into the studies that the artist built a painting on." But the bottom line is, screw the art and artist's choices, just take your tech and use it to peel back the decisions they made for what they presented and dwell on the analysis of that.

High-intensity x-rays from a particle accelerator compiled a two-dimensional map of the metallic atoms on the painting beneath the top image. Knowing that mercury atoms were part of a red pigment and the antimony atoms were part of a yellow pigment, the researchers were able to chart those colors in the underlying image. "We visualized — in great detail — the nose, the eyes, according to the chemical composition," scanning a roughly 7-inch square of the larger portrait, which took two full days.

Though his paintings are now worth millions, Van Gogh was virtually unknown during his lifetime and struggled financially before committing suicide, and often reused canvas to save money, either painting on the back or over the top of existing paintings. Experts believe roughly a third of his works hide a second painting underneath. The painting under "Patch of Grass" adds weight to the theory that Van Gogh mailed paintings from the Netherlands to his brother Theo, and, after moving to Paris to join him, found the old works and painted over them.

The researchers were excited about the prospect of using the technique to probe paintings by Van Gogh and other famous artists such as Rembrandt and Picasso, and totally undermine their creative output!

As a writer and musician, there's always a question of where your idea is going, and at what point it's complete. There are lots of false starts, big mistakes, poor choices, and bad decisions along the way, and by the time you see or hear something from an artist, that's what you were meant to take in. Sure, they want to see possible "masterpieces" from Vince because he was a recycler, but steping back into an artist's creative process is damaging to the end piece. Listening to a song in it's demo stage can be terrible. Looking over preliminary drafts of a story can be awful. Those discarded, replaced, and unused directions, while entertaining for the curious, are no place to be mining for prizes the artist clearly was not trying to share.