A full day. The night was sleepless. I had trouble breathing and the room was 22 degrees Celsius. My father woke up the house by opening the front door at 05:30. He thought someone rang the bell - a dream? Which empty visitor rings in early hours? I instantly thought Death.
Started the morning by continuing the underpainting to 'Ethics'. I've broadly ignored the colouration of the colour study, well, partially stuck to it. A tone study is, would have been, more useful. I like a sense of place, location. This is a training from art itself, historical art. Art has a room, a landscape, or it is a modern portrait with a plain background, a close space which is different. I'm representing ideas, feelings, complex narratives. I like a location and subversion of it, but increasingly I'm wanting to change the narrative and the location within a painting itself, so I'm starting to question and wrestle with my colours.
The tones here are strong, almost comic-book like, but this is not a problem. They are broadly based on one image of a volcanic eruption, my location, but there are elements of unreality. Do we see a sky or two skies? A second 'sky' made from mountains seems to be there, the grey. This is part of the narrative, and the complex elements, the hands and eyes are unreal elements, not from the mountain 'place'. I'm starting to think of colouration as part of a scene, but also thinking how colours transform a location. The colours in the Descartes painting do this extensively, there is just about a horizon but a lot of other complexity, contrast and energy. You can see lots of energy here, too.
At 13:30 I went with Deb to Bunbury to deliver my paintings for the art fair in the church there this weekend. What a lovely village Bunbury is, quite the perfect English village. We'll be going to the opening event on Friday.
Dr. Mee called and spoke about A.I. art. There is a revolution occurring in A.I. generated art and apps like 'Midjourney' making pseudo-human art, things that look vaguely abstract, vaguely human, but much more complex than the first A.I. art which took the world by storm: fractals. I can imagine this sort of art replacing lots of human created art; adverts, book covers, album covers etc. but what about its impact on fine art? I'm reminded again of fractals. They had a huge cultural impact in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Mandelbrot Set adorned book covers, posters etc. but had little or no impact on fine art.
Perhaps this next generation of A.I. art will be, in artistic terms, fractals v2.0 and nothing more, but who can say. I have a particular aversion to A.I. art, digital art, fractals. I love oil painting, and I became an artist oil painter exactly because of my aversion to digital art, a rejection of the digital similar to the 'arts and crafts' movement's rejection of the industrial age. I started by creating digital art in around 1999, 2000, 2001. I began to realise that it was easy, and that one day a machine could make pretty pictures, that any idiot with zero skill can make pretty pictures. Art is not about pretty pictures. Art is about the transmission of human feelings and complex concepts. No artificial intelligence could communicate human feelings to a human.
I have a particular hatred of lazy and talentless 'abstract' artists, 'photography' artists, 'digital' artists, 'pretty landscape' painters, and everything else that anyone can do. A.I. art might be the welcome death-knell to galleries who vend pretty rubbish - which, we must state, constitute the majority of high-street galleries. Perhaps these will value their 'hand-made' pretty landscapes and hand-made pretty abstract paintings, in an forlorn effort to distance themselves from the A.I. art which will essentially be the same but cheaper to make - perhaps (shock!) even prettier. The sort of art that I make, and other true artists make will never be threatened by such parlour tricks.
I make art because it is my life, my purpose, my 'ikagi'. If I didn't do what I did, nobody could or would - this is my key principle and a key definition of art itself. Most jobs are of the sort that if a worker stopped doing them, or died, another worker would take over and complete the same job with the same outcome; thus the worker's life is literally meaningless. Art is the antithesis of this because only the artist can create their art. Even the most avid and exacting student can not replicate the master - this is art's joy.
Art is the complete transcription of a feeling and concept, refined and practised over an entire lifetime. No A.I. could duplicate the thought processes of an artist, partly because an artist's experience is every living breath, glimpse, visit to here or there, knowledge of this or that relationship. Human experience and existence can't be modelled by an A.I. - it must be lived second by second. An android could live as a human, true, and android art would and could be comparable to a human's, but each android's art would be unique, as each humans' is - this is a very different concept than a metal box in a lab dreaming of a life and then trying to paint impressions of that dream. That would always and necessarily be a second-rate artistic representation.
No A.I. would be woken from a dream by his father answering the door, and then consider that the personification of Death was present in the empty void beyond, and then spend the next day painting with this consideration floating in the corner of its mind.
