Wow, so I just re-read my last post, the one I wrote on the plane coming home from Taos, and it was a doozy. For one thing, it raised the possibility that coming back here to Sweden might be difficult, or that our life here might pale in comparison. I think I probably should have written a quick follow up to that post a few weeks later letting you all know that everything here was good. But I’ll just do that now… everything is good! It’s been lovely to be back here.
Actually, to be fair, it WAS difficult returning. I find that whenever I travel between New Mexico and Sweden, or the other way around, it takes me about a week to adjust, both emotionally and in terms of sleep. But at least now I know that, and can expect it. And after a week, it's done.
The other thing I talked about in that last post was wanting to take my work in my studio more seriously, to treat it more like... work. And I'm happy to say that I've been fairly successful in that.
Christina and I are quite good at what I like to call 'homesteading.' That is to say, we do a darned good job at building houses - or renovating houses, in this case - and then continuing by making the home and the land around it really lovely. This also applies to workshop buildings. We have done this extensively in New Mexico (2 homes and a workshop), and now here in Sweden as well (a home and 2 workshops.) The problem with homesteading, however, is that it's never flippin' done! There is always something more to do! So, not too long after returning from New Mexico in August, I decided to draw a line in the sand and commit to spending at least 4 hours per day in my studio. The homesteading work, and everything else, would just have to fit into the remaining hours. I am proud to say that I have been semi-successful at this, because semi-successful at a 4 hour daily commitment is a hell of a lot better than the essentially no hours I was spending making art before.
I have basically finished one painting. I made a bunch of late corrections to it today and it might be done. I'll have to look at it again in a few days to be sure.
I'm also working on a small mechanical sculpture.
As crazy as this sounds, it is a sculpture I am coming back to after a 4-year pause. I started it in Taos in 2020, and I just brought all the parts back here to Sweden in my luggage a few months ago. I enjoy working on multiple projects simultaneously... so that if I ever feel stuck or bored with one, I can move to another. I do have a minor quandary about the subject matter of this particular sculpture which I will probably discuss in a future post. For now it can suffice to say that the sculpture involves a tricky mechanical challenge, which I enjoy.
At this point I seem to have more ideas for paintings and sculptures than time to make them. I feel pressure to make things. Maybe it's a sense of my own mortality. Maybe it's a sense that waiting for big festivals to give me money to make big sculptures has just been a colossal fucking waste of time, and I need to get to work and make up for lost time. I'm also feeling ambitiously broad in the media I want to work with; I'm already painting, but I have plans to also sculpt in traditional clay, in oil-based clay for eventual casting in bronze, in wood, and in stone. Today I bought some regular (water-based) clay to start a bust, like what I was doing in Barcelona a few years ago with Jorge Egea.
Speaking of Jorge and Barcelona, you might remember from my post back in June that I had failed in an attempt to buy a marble Jassans sculpture at auction. I'm very happy to report that the painful hole in my life... caused by not owning a genuine Jassans sculpture... has now been filled.
About 2 weeks ago I saw a listing for this well-documented sculpture in wood come up online, and.. after a little aggressive bargaining with the seller... I was able to bring it home for about 73% of his asking price. I really didn't know how I would pay for it at the time, but I couldn't lose the opportunity! I ended up selling three (1, 2, 3) of my original Wicked Wanda paintings by Ron Embleton to another collector, which more than covered the purchase of the Jassans. As I mentioned in June, Jassans is really my favorite sculptor. Looking at his work, especially in person, brings me back to my days in Barcelona, AND inspires me to sculpt. What a fucking genius the guy was. I've recently enjoyed reading my old posts about him, here and here, and I'm now also reading some of the books I have about him, with the help of Google Translate, because... everything about him is in Catalan! (I suppose it's lucky for me that he never got more famous - according to Jorge he never cared about fame - because it makes his sculptures comparatively affordable. But the flip-side is that there's almost nothing written about him in English.)
Anyway, back to me and MY art!
Like many painters, I like to have an image in front of me when I paint. And I have very specific ideas about WHAT I want to paint. But I have struggled a lot over the last few years with HOW to arrive at this visual source material. I have paid models on several occasions to take photographs of them, but overall this has been a frustrating experience. For me, the key to my paintings is facial expression, and over time I have come to realize that a model's ability to make facial expression is probably the most important thing to me. A woman can be beautiful, and have a beautiful body, but if she cannot act (it's essentially acting that I am talking about here), then it's not going to yield anything useful for me.
(Side note: I've just finished reading two books, back to back, about the human face. What a fascinating topic! The first of those books makes the interesting point that it's really only actors who can masterfully and convincingly control their faces at will - to make us believe that they're feeling what they are actually only pretending to feel - and we pay them handsomely for this comparatively rare skill.)
From all the photos I've taken of models, I've only ever painted one painting. Paying models isn't super-cheap, so that doesn't seem like such a great investment.
Another technique I've employed is essentially photo collage; I will find photos representing different parts of a woman and put them together in Photoshop to make the image I want. I'm quite good at Photoshop and I've gotten some reasonably good results this way. But I'm not THAT good, and there are always frustrations, especially when it comes to making the lighting match on the different parts of the body.
I've recently been building up the confidence to just draw my source material... in other words to simply draw the people I want to paint and then paint those drawings. It's certainly a time-honored method, practiced by artists throughout history, AND I've been drawing from live models for a few years now and my drawings are definitely getting better... BUT it feels to me like a pretty big fucking step. And it would require a lot of confidence in my drawing skills. The bottom line is that I won't rely solely on my drawing skills if that undermines the quality of the finished painting. Nevertheless, I will likely begin to experiment soon.
But this whole discussion has been leading me to what I really want to talk about, which is AI image generators (AKA generative AI) or.. for those of you who aren't familiar with the concept.. software (websites) which can generate images based on text inputs (called "prompts"), or based on other images. This looks like it should be a real boon to artists looking for copyright-free source images, and frankly it is. (The copyright to the images you generate on the various sites belongs to you, the user... at least for now.) There are, however, pitfalls...
But AI is such a hot topic right now that it warrants a very brief aside... Most people seem agree that AI (and here we are no longer really talking about visually generative AI but rather information-processing AI, more like ChatGPT and its descendents) could one day pose an existential threat to humanity, but that's not the "pitfalls" I'm talking about. The existential threat presents variously as "AI will kill all humans," or "AI will replace humans... or at least take their jobs." While it strikes me as reasonable that doomsday scenarios such as these are possible, back in the mundane here-and-now world of art-making, I tend to agree with these articles (1, 2, 3) which take the position that artists are safe from generative AI, at least those artists engaged in the production of "High Art" like painting and sculpture. At least for the time being.
No, the pitfalls I'm talking about are much more pedestrian, and are specific to the use of generative AI. First off, a lot of the images coming out of these image generators can look similar to each other, and so images made this way can have an 'AI look.' To be fair, the various bits of software are getting better all the time, and if you are willing to keep playing with them I think you can sort of get around this same-same problem... but it takes some work. Another problem is that it can sometimes be pretty difficult to get the software to do what you want it to. If you're open to being surprised, it can be a lot of fun; but if you want something really specific it can be frustrating. Also, like most screen-based technologies out there, it can be quite addicting. You can spend a lot of time on it. You have to be disciplined. And lastly (and this is the danger that I take the most seriously), I think that making an image with AI has the potential to satisfy the artistic impulse (or the dopamine circuits) so thoroughly that one no longer feels the need to even make the painting. There are many people out there making AI generated art, and then calling the whole process done; in other words, for them the digital image is the end goal. But to me, that's not good enough. Because the best you can do with that is to make a print, and a print is not an artwork. A print is an object that is produced by a machine, while a painting is an object made by a person. Some people will bristle at this distinction, but that's how I feel about it.
As far as the specific image generators I've used, most of my experience has been with Midjourney, Freepik, and Getimg, as well as a few others. The source image for my newest painting... the one I'm still working on above... was made with a combination of found imagery, Midjourney, Freepik, and Photoshop. It's the first painting for which I've employed AI. (To be honest, I think the reasons I've struggled a bit more than usual with this painting are rooted in this combined approach.)
Some people (including many artists) have a violently negative reaction to these image generators, but for me AI is just another tool in the toolbox. If I could find a model who could really emote, that would be great. And if one day I get to the point where I can draw exactly what I want to paint, with all the required subtlety of expression, that would be fantastic. In the meantime, AI image generation opens up a lot of possibilities.
Just for fun, here are a few images I've made, along with the text prompts that generated them:
smiling feminine skull with long hair and sunglasses
