Sisyphean Experiments, Artistic Pathways, AI Dali

A slow day today. Did some composition experiments for details of a painting called 'The Impossible Hopes Of Sisyphus', one the next group of artworks. I had hoped to glaze some of the current four ('All Things Bright And Beautiful', 'Crushed Are The Meek', 'Them And Us', 'All The Broken Hearted') today, but awoke weak and unmotivated, mainly due to the heat and late night. Deborah suggested underpainting 'Punishment Of The Sun' and I liked the idea. Tomorrow I will begin, as the underdrawing lines are now dry due to the heatwave. This is one of the most complex and detailed paintings I've worked on in some years. I expect it will take a five or more days.

In future I will paint large, and with a detail and finish of a renaissance master, or fine academic painter of the 19th century. It is the technical, practical, and physical challenges of which I have now practiced over many years which make this ideal. Few would want to do it, few are capable of doing it, and I can do it faster and better than most. I used to wonder why nobody wrote more Beethoven symphonies, why nobody painted more paintings like Leonardo da Vinci, why nobody completed the half-complete yet brilliant ideas of past masters. The main reason is that nobody could, although there are many secondary reasons about why, the cost, the time. I must do what I can because only I can do this. My ideas and abilities are unique; thus is it my unhappy yet stoic duty to humanity to do so. These ideas must be made corporeal, and I'm the only person capable.

I asked AI what Salvador Dali of my age would be doing today. The results were amusing:

I do not wake up to an alarm; I wake up to the rhythmic, subconscious ticking of my own biological clock, which laughs at your digital Apple Watches. Time is not a grid of numbers; it is fluid, melting like Camembert cheese in the sun.

The Ocelot Walk: I take my pet ocelot (cloned, naturally, from the DNA of my beloved Babou) for a walk down the streets of New York, wearing a cape woven entirely from optic fibres that pulse in synchronization with my heartbeat.

I like the idea of this cape!

The Digital Canvas: I spend two hours in my studio, not touching a brush, but utilizing eye-tracking neural interfaces to paint hyper-realistic bread directly into the virtual reality ether.

Of this I'm more sceptical. Dali was, perhaps above all things, passionate about oil painting. Unlike Warhol, I think he'd see digital art, and AI art, as a dangerous invader, a polluter of the purity of oil and the organic reality of humanity. Acrylic paints, and plastic paints of many sorts, were around and popular in his lifetime - he broadly avoided them.

There were other elements of amusing hyperbole about the joy of AI and virtual reality. Then:

By this evening, Gala and I will have launched our newest venture: Non-Fungible Eyelashes.

I love this phrase!

The amusements of AI are waning. It's a fun tool, but something of another drain of time, like social media, though I'll use it as a tool as I do all others. My skills are primarily physical and organic. Blessed be oil paint! How lucky I am that this best of media is unpopular today. Dali wrote about the 'conquest of the irrational', but today it is the digital which must be conquered by the organic and the physical.

Onwards we roll our Sisyphean rock! With joy, but yes, slowly and stoically. We must not be distracted by sights of jewels. The rewards lie on the horizon, somewhere over the rainbow.

Punishment Of The Sun Image Transfer, Waking Slow Organ

Today, transferring the underdrawing for 'Punishment Of The Sun'. An arduous process of tracing with oil-paint, this involved nearly an hour of cleaning at the end so that I can re-use the polyester drafting film. I feel more assured in my artistic direction. I'd like to paint bigger, but this is a compromise of size vs. quantity. It's easy to paint one large painting a year, but I prefer 10 or 20, and so prefer to vary the size. Anything over 1M framed begins to limit a painting's entry into competitions or open exhibitions. Anything over 2M limits this to the Royal Academy alone, or a commercial gallery; almost no open competitions would permit something that big.

After that, some keyboard playing for Mike Drew's latest song. Thus the day flies. It's 28 degrees in here, the hottest it's yet been in 2026.

Punishment Of The Sun Drawing

Hottest day of this third heatwave of the year. A full day working (appropriately) on 'Punishment Of The Sun'. The drawing took most of yesterday and today, completed by 15:00. I had thought about merging the figure into the desert floor like the Untouchable Strawberry painting, but it looked rather good without this. I added a few elements from the original plan; a hand shaped tree-structure and the sun itself with rays reminiscent of a radiation symbol. I changed the woman's arm into a green caterpillar, also part of the original plan, but left it suspended vertically as in the Cabanel painting, this seemed to benefit the composition in many ways, mirroring the hand tree, and aiding the dry tree on the left. That dry tree and the dried flowers on the desert floor were additions by the AI, both good ones.

I toned the canvas with yellow oxide to prepare it, and have started the first tracing stage using a sheet of Polydraw and a pencil, pencil so that I can rub away the lines to re-use the sheet of this expensive plastic. This one piece might be five to ten pounds worth. The canvas piece ten to fifteen, the MDF ten. These larger works cost more by every metric, and this one isn't huge, a mere 60x86cm, about the same size as 'Triumph Of The Mechanauts'.

AI and Punishment Of The Sun Composition

I've rarely used AI creatively. Never in music, except of course the algorithmic music generator I programmed in 2014, Oldfield 1, subsequently releasing an album of such tracks in 2015; thus I can claim that Art By Machine was the first commercial AI music album (algorithmic music was created far earlier, perhaps going back to the 1950s, but it's uncertain if this music was published commercially by a record label). Today, the term 'AI' generally means generative AI using neural networks; so 'AI' generally now means tools and output created since winter 2022 when Chat GPT appeared. Still, the Oldfield example already shows that AI usage isn't necessarily a simple yes or no. Also, as time moves on, everything is tainted by AI. Perhaps writers who have ever read some AI text and have become inspired or influenced by it could be said to be using AI, even if they, ahem, never have!

I've never used AI in writing, incidentally, not even for proof reading. In visual art I've not used it to generate digital art. I dislike the whole idea of this, just as I dislike the whole idea of music generation with apps like Suno. It's fine for people without imagination or those with no skills, but I have both. I also like physical media. I became an oil painter partly as a rebellion from the digital realm. I like CDs, I like oil painting, and rarely make digital art at all... but I do sometimes, and nowadays primarily for 'graphics'; that is my album covers, for book covers. Using generative AI in this context is, for me, more acceptable. This isn't 'fine art'. Fine art should be about expressing human values to other humans, and it should show personal skill and brilliance - this I value hugely. Making art should be difficult. One reason I dislike AI is that it's easy; any idiot can use it.

Yet, AI can be used creatively, to enhance and inspire, to improve imagination. It can also speed up a process which could be done mechanically and slowly.

I've not ever tried using AI for video, though I enjoy watching a few of these by Lanny Quarles, Peter Gric.

Before today, the only time I've used generative AI in art is image enhancement, attempting to improve poor quality reference images, and then only twice. This isn't always useful, as unrealistic artifacts seem to be created, but it can be of some use. I can filter those bits out; I know anatomy and how details like ears and hair should look even if the AI doesn't.

Today though, I decided to experimentally use AI to create reference images for my next painting, 'Punishment Of The Sun'. I have many ways of working, but amassing source references images for textures and scene elements is something I do for almost all paintings, and using AI for this rather than trawling free image sites like Pexels, or making my own, is a helpful and time-saving tool. One downside is that the resolution and quality is (ironically) rather poor, and there are those unrealistic parts; but those things aren't important for reference images I'll be painting from. To some extent, I like these flaws, as it requires more skill; I'm trained in improving images 'by hand' as I draw and paint.

With AI I can feed it my idea and work on generating a scene in a new-virtual way. In the past I've made 3D computer model scenes, and perhaps now favour making and lighting clay or cardboard models, but AI is another tool that I can use. It must be used with great care, not to compromise skill or imagination, but enhance both. The uniqueness of each artist is a vital spark that must be preserved; but even in AI, artists like Lanny Quarles have this in spades.

Art Supplies, Prometheus 3.89 Tweaks

A hot day has flown with only slight productivity. Some mount board ordered today. Have spent £746 on painting supplies and art events and transportation in the first 3 months of the tax year. This is more than I've spent on art per year for perhaps the last 10 years, so underlines my charge into painting in 2026, though there are cyclical supplies which need occasional re-stocking. Larger paintings need more supplies, the mount board, canvases, frames are more expensive.

Added a new feature to Prometheus too. I made it possible to randomly jiggle the tuning of a selection of notes, thus allowing controlled de-tuning. Random pitch was already possible per-instrument or per-track, but here allows explicit detuning, but also larger jumps to create random notes for example.

Another heat wave is upon us and I'm unsure about whether to paint existing works, or work on other things. One other job today was mount cutting for 4 frames, hence the need for mount board.

ATBH Day 3, Prometheus v3.89

Final underpainting day of 'All The Broken Hearted'. Now all four paintings of my current tranche of works are underpainted, awaiting glazing. I'm reminded that time is short, that the summer is nearly out, considering the time these alone will take to complete. I must aim higher, jump straight to masterpieces.

After painting, updated Prometheus to v3.89 with some little efficiencies, removing 20 or more menu items.

ATBH Day 2

Second day of painting. Exhausting details of feathers! One day of underpainting remains.

All The Broken Hearted Underpainting Begins

Today, started the underpainting too 'All The Broken Hearted'. Difficult this, as it's largely imaginary, and the poses and lighting on the textures require a lot of invention. Dali railed against imagination painting in this way, but did so out of frustration. Invention and adding more than is there in reality is part of the skill of painting, and an essential part of self expression - we are not human cameras. Bierstadt's mountains and Edwin Church's clouds are more real than reality, they are beyond nature, caricatures.