An artist's journey - old vs new.
The arrival of Generative-AI has given me many opportunities to pause and consider what art and creativity is to me. Is it just typing prompts into a machine and waiting for a result? For me - the answer is always no.
As I browsed through an old hard drive today with some of my oldest works on it, I considered my own artistic journey over the last 30+ years. I remembered how I used to browse through copies of Empire magazine, hoping for some stunning portraits to copy in pencil as I slavishly learned how a face was composed, or National Geographic magazines where I learned how the hairs on a tiger's face flow in different directions. Or even my old A-Level exam artworks where I studied the medieval gargoyles on old churches in the area and created my own body of work from clay in this style.
These themes still run deep in my work. I don't really see that I've left behind anything, they've all been included in the palette that is my artistic body of work. I see them in the eyes of my portraits when I learned very early on that if you don't get the eyes right - you might as well not bother with the rest! I see it in my deep love of animal artwork whether that be in my Totem project, my spirit animals, or the new paintings I'm embarking on today in acrylics. I see it in the creative play times and in the client commissions that keep the bills payed.
AI might be a nice, quick, easy way to make something pretty, but artwork for me represents a lifetime of learning, a life of looking at colour and wondering how to blend my own, a life of seeing the grace of a dancer or acrobat and wondering whether I could ever capture that moment in still form and somehow imbue that sense of dynamism in a flat 2 dimensional piece.
Most importantly I've realised I'm never going to convince anyone else of what creativity is and why it's important. It is at its root a personal journey on which some of us choose to embark. I am made better for it. When I look back at my old work I see every painstaking moment of practice, every 'mistake', mishap and frustration as part of the journey of my life laid bare before me and for that I'm happy.
