Ideas for a weekly art review

AI for the Holidays!

This week I’m trying to come up with some ideas for a weekly art review. I’m hoping to start a new process for the new year. I would like to use this blog space to track my progress a little better, and with that in mind, I came up with the idea of using a weekly template. The template will be a what/why/when/where/how series of questions of what I am working on. Even if it’s not an extremely productive week, I can still use the template to describe what I have been looking at and thinking about from an art perspective. And If I didn’t work on anything? Then a few sentences to describe why I didn’t work on anything. With this in mind, I’ll try to describe last week’s work.

What kind of art did I work on?

Images of ethereal, floating goddess figures, with flowers.

Ethereal Goddess Figures

Why did I choose to work on this art?

A very cool thing happened couple weeks ago. We were cleaning out the basement and I found some old paintings that were at least 20 years old. Awhile back I had almost thrown them away, but my husband convinced me to keep them. They were found wrapped up in garbage bags, deep within a crawl space. Some of them were perplexing and cringeworthy, but one of them stood out to me as meaningful:

I’ve been reading some Jung lately, and thinking about female archetypes as they relate to deities, particularly from hinduism. So this image really seemed to mesh with that. Finding it made me feel like I discovered a path or a thread that I abandoned long ago. I was excited to digitize this oil painting and then start seeing where it went.

How did I do it? What was the art process?

First I put the image through an AI, using wombo dream. I used various prompts including the words, “goddess” and “ethereal.” Eventually I began digitally collaging the end results. The previous week, I had been generating AI flowers on a dark background, and this ended up being a perfect thing to throw in the mix. At some point I started to utilize some some Metropolitan Museum of Art images, particularly from the costume institute. Overall, I got a lot of mileage out of the original idea, and generated many images that could be used later.

Where is this art headed? Do I want to continue this path, or file it away for later?

I’m not sure where this is headed but I like the idea of exploring feminine archetypes, using the AI. Jung’s idea was that archetypes exist in a sort of generational wisdom that lives on in our psyche. They are manifested in things like dreams and storytelling and the making of art. AI art technology is trained on vast libraries of art produced by humans. So does it make sense that we could unearth some archetypical knowledge when interacting with the AI? I think yes. At any rate, it’s an interesting lens to view AI art through. The humans created the data that powers AI art, so does the end result tell us something about humans that we didn’t previously see?

What if I didn’t create any art this week?

The time that I referenced in this post was December 3-13th. What about the week after that? In fact, I produced absolutely nothing. I worked a bunch of nursing shifts and any other free time I had was consumed by holiday entertaining and preparations. I do realize there will be weeks like this. Life goes on, so if there is a week where I spend more time consuming art, rather than creating it, I will try to document that, and maybe I will have a template especially for that. This past week, in between nursing shifts, I took a deep dive into the work of David Hockney. His foundation website is an incredibly well organized site, and I found so much to be inspired by. Perhaps I will squeeze in another post about that, but in the mean time, expect to see more weekly art reviews in the new year!

 


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