I just finished a wholesale scanning/editing operation of the work I’ve done this year, which has been mostly paintings.
Despite a year full of illness and elder care, I made twelve paintings that felt good enough to put out there, and mostly I think that’s pretty good — she wrote defiantly! (Of course I also spend the requisite amount of time feeling like shit about my productivity, but not today Satan.)
There is some digital work that I still need to upload, and that’s up next. Then there is also the sketchbooks and the art journals due for the scanner, which have some collage in there, and some textile work that I likely won’t share.
But the freestanding work which is meant for the world was my first priority and those are now all up on the “work”/home page of this website, and are the first pieces you’ll see in each category. No one is planning a tickertape parade to fete me for this accomplishment, so I thought I’d share a few random thoughts here as a victory lap.
Here is a painting that will be thematically on point for the rest of what I want to say:
Anyone reading this is most likely aware of the way that AI has rocked the illustration and art world. I’m obviously not pro machines making art. I came up in journalism, mostly magazine journalism and I’d really rather not see another industry I’m in go the way of the dinos.
One thing that surprised me when I got more into visual art was how essential Photoshop and its ilk are to the endeavor. Even if you never create work digitally, you are going to share it digitally. There is no scanner or camera yet invented that can perfectly capture work without requiring at least a little tweaking, often much more than that. Not knowing how to edit an image is tying at least one hand behind your back.
Back when I was renting a bench in a jewelry studio, the lovely owner hosted some art school students, and she was asked what skill she’s leaned on the most. She said Photoshop. This really took me aback at the time — after all, when you’re making jewelry you’re literally dealing with precious metals and fire — but she was right. Subsequently I invested quite a bit of time learning Photoshop (which translates to similar programs as well) and I’ve yet to regret that.
Anywho, I hadn’t done a big serious scan and edit of trad work in over a year — and while Photoshop has had plenty of AI under the hood for a while, damned if the new stuff didn’t make the job much faster and easier!
Ten of the twelve pieces were too large to scan in one go, so I was dealing with multiple files for an image, before I even got to color correction and so forth. In typical Photoshop fashion, the functions I found the most useful were buried in weird menus, so I didn’t find them immediately. I can state with certainty that without AI, I’d be at least a workweek away from typing this very sentence.
I guess something like this has been a standard part of technology’s apologia for a while — that the machines will handle the tedious parts of work, leaving the good stuff to the humans. I think we’ve seen that even when it’s true, it’s not necessarily a social good. I don’t have a well developed grand point to make here, just that like with everything, the issue of AI and art is more complex than any simple slogan can express.
*Original title was “Me Myself and AI” but I figured I wasn’t the first one to think of that. Since there’s a podcast by that name I tweaked my title, lest there be confusion in the marketplace.