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Tag: AI

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Deskilling art

“Pull up your Big Girl Panties,” 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

A lot of my sentences these days start, “When I was a child…” Here’s one: when I was a child, most people had basic sewing skills. They were so fundamental that the government issued free instructional pamphlets to encourage people to sew more. The same was true of canning, gardening, and appliance repair.

Today, why fix or make it when you can buy it for less? Sewing has gone the way of the buggy whip, and unless something radically changes in the world economy, sewing has become a hobby.

Technology hasn’t replaced work; here in the US, those of us who work are putting in the same basic workweek as our grandparents did in 1940. But what we do in that time is very different.

Toy Reindeer with double rainbow, oil on archival canvasboard, 6X8, $435 framed, includes shipping in continental US.

Deskilling or changing?

The extended-play version of my wedding album was shot on just a few rolls of film. The photographer was extremely skilled at metering and setting exposures. Today’s typical wedding photographers shoot hundreds of pictures, focusing much more on candid shots. The camera does the technical work and the difference between any two shots in a sequence will be mostly chance.

That doesn’t mean a trained monkey can take your wedding pictures. There remain the questions of composition, visual storytelling and context. None of those can be automated and they certainly can’t be added after the fact.

Baby Monkey Riding on a Pig, oil on archival canvasboard, $435.

Deskilling art

A few years ago, most AI-generated images were laughable. They have gotten frighteningly better; there are times when only the context tells us they’re impossible (like these Trump-Biden AI-generated ‘buddy’ pictures). The only thing standing between us and a complete breakdown of factual verification is the integrity of our news sources. Ouch.

I recently wrote a lesson about still life and was looking for an example in hyperrealism. Despite having decades of experience looking at and analyzing art, I could not tell from online images if what I was seeing was painted by human hands or was computer-generated. That means that the only thing the hyperrealist painter has is his or her brush strokes, and I am not certain that AI isn’t coming for those, too.

Hyperrealism isn’t, of course, photorealism—it’s as much an edited form of reality as impressionism. But it’s easier to fake with a computer.

Hiking, 6X8, oil on archival canvasboard, $435 includes shipping in continental US.

What this means for the rest of us

Most of us are not interested in the absolute bell-like clarity of hyperrealism. That gives us a little breathing room, but it still leaves the question of why we’re making art, and how we can do it in a way that says more than AI will.

I wrote Monday’s post about funny paintings in part because for the last month or so I’ve been seeing variations on a worn-out theme. These are not-particularly well-painted portraits of politicians spattered with verbiage. Their faces being well-known and the words being obvious, I think this would be very easy for AI to dupe. However, one thing AI seems incapable of doing is writing good jokes.

It’s harder to be funny than to be didactic. It’s harder to be winsome than to be angry. It’s harder to be subtle than to hit the viewer over the head with a sledgehammer. And, yes, it’s harder to think about beauty and logic and proportion than about dogma. So, if you’re looking for job security in the age of deskilling art, be smarter than your average AI image generator.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Things that are real

American Eagle, painted from the deck during one of my schooner watercolor workshops.

For a certified geriatric, I’m pretty good at the internet, but it is demanding. There’s a constant encroachment of synthetic experience, in the form of AI and enhanced photographs. There are scammers. Moreover, I feel obliged to read the news, which has become yet another virtual experience. Meanwhile, the sun is shining and the soft ocean breezes are blowing, but too many of us are in our air-conditioned rooms experiencing life vicariously.

I see a steady shrinking of real, physical, authentic experiences. Sometimes I worry that reality is downright endangered.

A painting student from an Adirondack workshop, with her perspective drawing carefully at hand. She’s coming to my Schoodic workshop next month.

Some of the things you can’t get from AI

Paintings They’re tangible, tactile, dimensional, handmade objects, which is why they don’t lend themselves to being made into NFTs.

Nature. My photos have been viewed on Google more than 66,000 times. I think 90% of them were taken on Beech Hill. As many pictures as I take, I know my plein air workshop students experience it in a way no photo can recreate. It is never the same two days running.

The ocean. Penobscot Bay is a constantly-changing sensory delight, with cool breezes, the tang of saltwater, and a smattering of offshore islands that sparkle in the sun. Even the best photo can only capture the visual, and then incompletely. Those other sensations are not reproducible.

You can see the beauty in this photo, but you can’t experience the moment except by being there.

This boat, which has been sailing the Gulf of Maine for close to a century. It’s ecotourism at its best, and you don’t experience the ocean as fully in any other vessel. For one thing, it’s quiet.

Little villages. Yes, Maine villages are photogenic, but they’re also communities. Painting them from a picture is one thing; painting them in real life means you learn about the place. For example, on Thursday, Jeanne-Marie and I learned who owned that magnificent yellow house she was painting and the likelihood it would go on the market. We also learned who’s doing what at the Camden Garden Club Tour tomorrow. Then she walked downtown and got coffee at Zoot, which is almost next door to where my paintings are hanging at Lone Pine Realty. You feel the difference in a small town.

Students in my watercolor workshop aboard schooner American Eagle.

Real time. That’s sometimes fast, and sometimes slow, but it’s dictated by reality, not video. Plein air painting can challenge you to work quickly and decisively or it can allow you to relax into the place. It’s simply less structured than virtual reality.

A sense of place. Every time I say goodbye to a plein air workshop group, I find myself telling them to move to midcoast Maine. We’ve developed deep relationships in the week we’ve painted together, and I want them all to be my neighbors.

Myriad viewpoints. There’s never just one view; there are multiple compositions at almost every place. That and the constantly-changing light are inspiring in a way that AI or photographs can never be. They force you to think in a way that copying a photo never can.

We were painting at Owl’s Head and suddenly the fog dropped and everything in the world changed.

Know what’s real? Plein air workshops.

I love teaching on Zoom for many reasons, but the most important is that my Zoom students make very fast progress. However, I also need to teach plein air workshops too; that’s a soul call, not a financial one.

Even though I have very close friendships in cyberspace, the human connection in a workshop is different. I saw Sharon of right-angle fame yesterday. We had a brief, warm and charming conversation that made me smile all day.

A note: I have a few openings for Sea & Sky at Acadia National Park, but if you want to take that workshop and stay at the Schoodic Institute, the drop-dead deadline is this coming Monday. I have a little more flexibility for commuters, but I don’t know how likely it is that you’ll find a rental this late in the season.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025:

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Monday Morning Art School: don’t worry about AI just yet

Gathering Storm, Ivan Ayvazovsky, 1899, courtesy Sothebys

The sublime

The 18th century brought the concept of the sublime into our consciousness. That means a quality of greatness beyond counting-what the religious might call the presence of God. It is harmony and horror in equal measure, and it’s meant to apply to every sphere of human endeavor and experience. You might experience the sublime standing on the lip of the Grand Canyon, where your appreciation of the sunrise is informed by your awe in realizing that there’s no barrier between you and that huge hole. It is a meeting of our emotional selves with the wonders of creation.

In painting, that experience is articulated in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. It has its parallels in every art form. In the 20th century, the advent of unparalleled efficient death-in-warfare made it appear in poetry, like Wilfred Owen’s tragic, beautiful Dulce et Decorum Est.

“Art is for seeing evil,” writes philosopher Agnes Callard. “Evil’ in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation.” In short, she’s talking about whatever is the opposite of goodness, beauty, and virtue.

I think that art is for more than that, but it’s a component.

My first attempt to replicate the theme of Gathering Storm with an AI image generator.

AI generated art

A reader asked me my thoughts about Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated art. I have little experience with it; I’ve tinkered with ChatGPT. It creates a facsimile of human writing, strings of language that are fundamentally meaningless. It’s perfect, then for advertising copy.

What can an equivalent image generator make? If recent news is to be believed, very brilliant facsimiles of artwork. But can this work make intelligent paintings? I decided to try my hand with an easily-available online generator.

My second attempt looks like an evening sail in Penobscot Bay. No drama whatsoever.

I used as a reference, Ivan Ayvazovsky‘s Gathering Storm, above. This painting operates at two levels-first, our sheer terror at the beauty and violence of the sea. Then we notice that the boat appears to be floating rudderless within the storm. It’s both a beautiful painting and a perfect metaphor for aspects of our human existence-the epitome of the sublime in painting.

I thought up a set of descriptors for Aivazovsky’s painting: evening ocean storm squarerigger. The app came up with the image above. Cute, but cartoonish.

On the surface, perhaps, it would make a decent painting, but there’s nothing terrifying or profound about it. I refined that by changing keywords, ending up by adding “bleak,” which just gave me a low-chroma version of the prior iteration. My succession of images are as they appear in this post.

Upping the ‘wild sea’ adjectives just made me lose the boat. And the composition is nothing to write home about.

Tinkering might lead me to much better apps online. But while these images are good, they’re devoid of human emotion or ideas. Yes, they can occasionally get lucky and come up with an image that ‘means’ something, but that requires a human curator to discern. They’re just like Google Image Search with filters.

Adding ‘bleak’ just made me lose the chroma.

The greatest ability we have in painting isn’t our technical skill (as important as that is) but our human intellect, both rational and emotional. The 20th century movement towards content-free art is over, because it can be done better and faster by machines. It doesn’t matter if you’re painting abstraction or landscape; start thinking about what the higher meaning of your work is. If it’s not there, you can be replaced by a computer.

Reserve your spot now for a workshop in 2025: