Unlocking Creativity or Daydreaming

 “I’ve been planning a large painting of flamingos for awhile. We artists are mocked for daydreaming but so much of painting is, as I like to call it “internal visualisation” of a finished piece. A large proportion of the planning is not physical work on paper or canvas but turning it over in your mind. Unseen. Definitely not daydreaming.”

from Catherine Ingleby’s article in the upcoming July copy of The Artist magazine

Her article really connects with what I have been absorbed about how creativity strikes. She highlights three things that help her. They start with planning and preparatory work organising everything, which she believes will eventually bring a freshness to your paintings. Secondly, she suggests converting photos of your work into monochrome black or white, if the painting doesn’t work in black and white it’s unlikely to be successful in colour. I fully concur with this observation. Thirdly but quiet important she says try doing your own colour charts just using two or three of your favourite pigments, she suggests you might be very surprised how much you learn.

In the article she also limits herself to only really three tonal ranges light midtone and dark but bounded by black and white. She also limits her palette to two or three colours and things they can mix. I think three or four would still be fine.

Developing a New Self-Portrait for my Website

It was time to change my profile pic on my website my website. Not so much my profile self-portrait that’s the first image you see on my landing page. It’s traditionally been a self-portrait. The previous one was about my eye operation, an abandoned attempt to paint it and photograph the bandages.At the time, I was also slightly overwhelmed by the apparent significant progress in generative AI. Neural network learning applied to graphics and large language models, training on massive data sets scraped from the internet. In the end, I had combined a photo with my style of painting, using my own technique following what is usually called style AI.

My eye is on the mend and it’s time to update my portrait profile picture. Back in the beginning of the Covid lockdowns, I did a short month-long project painting various self-portraits in a variety of formats & styles. It was a lot of fun. One of the self portaits saw me holding up a small square canvas with a stylized version of my face in front of my face as I was photographed. The motivation was thinking about what we can believe as truthful on social media. It was a genuine photograph not photo-manipulated at all. Already people were suspicious that a lot of photos on social media claiming they were “photoshopped”.

Moving ahead a few years, we commonly have generative AI and deep fakes. In most cases, someone familiar with photography or art will still be able to spot inconsistencies usually to do with the lighting on the subject versus the background or perspective. But that’s another story. I was interested in revisiting the issue of what is real on the Internet and this time. I was definitely wanting to use AI, but style AI where I am using my own mark-making to modify my own photo. Just making the photo into line worked quite well. Perhaps disguising the impression of holding up something in front of my face so I simply added a semi-transparent square. 

To be honest the result hasn’t excited me but I have achieved what I was looking to do. I want to show I understand the potential of AI to make something original and creative, but not doing it in a copycat / "likeme" way.

PS: Should have taken my time before I uploaded the new photo. Did not really show what i wanted to say, so I went back to my original self portrait.