These paintings, set here in order of when I started them/conceptualized them, represent a journey that I’ve gone on over the past few weeks. I started out with the David Bowie painting – now finally complete, partially as a material exploration (grisaille technique and oil painting), and partially to explore the topic of AI.
My initial thoughts around AI was to illustrate how and why AI would never be able to take the place of artists. Whilst I feel that my David Bowie painting, upon closer scrutinisation by a viewer, would bring them to that conclusion too, I feel that this topic was exhausted before I’d even begun.
But then I began to play with the AI options more, wanting to give myself the sensorial experience of immersing myself in joyful but gentle colours. I intended to paint a ‘fractured-Dali’ as an ode to my favourite artist of all time. Unintentionally though, there’s a real Munch-Scream-feel to the lines of the background. Whilst I again enjoyed exploring the medium of oil more and with each painting I feel that I am improving, I still didn’t feel that this piece had the depth that I was looking for.
I then realised that in order to explore AI, it doesn’t actually have to be the main idea or the main topic of enquiry – it could merely be an additional layer to my technique, almost part of the style and the medium, but not necessarily the message in the work. The third painting therefore, revisits the idea of a fractured-Dali, this time instead using Dali’s composition style as the springboard from which to communicate something deeper. I so enjoyed the pastel colours of the second painting, that I pulled it across to the third, but this time creating a much more abstract composition.
And so even though these may seem like three entirely unrelated paintings, for me they are representative of a journey of growth, process, risk, experimentation, and passage of time.
(Post Script added a few weeks later):
In the third painting, titled The Enchantment of the Anthropocene, something interesting started to happen as I got further into the progress of this painting. Spearheaded by the fact that humans are assemblages of multiple species (i.e. the number of microbiota that make up our bodies outnumber human cells 10:1… we are more other species – bacteria, fungus, virus – than we are human), I wanted to depict a world where species turned out differently than they are in this current world. Little did I know that these creatures would later begin to take on a life of their own, demanding appearance in subsequent artworks where the paintings merely became alternative worlds and ecosystems in which the Creatures could exist).
Debbie New 