How I use AI in my traditional painting practice
I have had many enquiries lately about how I am using AI in my painting practice. I thought I’d take a moment here to break down my process.
Here I outline my first experiences working with emerging AI technologies as a tool to enhance my traditional painting practice. I am not commenting on how others are using AI to create completed digital images, I am talking specifically about how I use AI image generation tools to clarify my ideas and tap into a world of artificially created imagery.
My background as a graphic designer has meant that I have grown up professionally using design tools and software, therefore it seemed natural for me to incorporate this new image generation technology into my art practice. Lately, I have been using AI as a brainstorming and planning tool that enriches the narratives in my work. Working with AI has given me a connection to visual culture references that I may not be exposed to in my regular human activity, and I believe that by using these tools I can enhance my own ideas and create stronger contemporary narratives. I am also interested in how AI uses visually recorded human experiences to create new visuals that reflect a distorted view of reality. I use this imagery as reference material in the same way I used any other externally sourced imagery previously, reflecting my experience as a contemporary visual artist.
I have been experimenting with AI since March 2023, whilst undertaking my honours degree. I had been exploring how I grew visual ideas in my mind that I could reproduce as physical art works in an external environment for others to see and experience. I was mainly using portraiture to record experiences, such as conversations with supervisors. I had been using a proxy portraiture method, i.e. using models found in online searches to represent myself in paintings, as I was having trouble painting myself. Not from a physical perspective but from an emotional one. I had been dealing with a major physical illness over the last five years and it had taken a toll on me physically and mentally. As much as I felt that I didn’t really want to talk about it, my mind was actively thinking and ruminating on trauma. With the introduction of AI into my practice, I discovered that I could somehow bypass these emotions. I liken it to looking through a filter or a camera obscura. It helped me to process my thoughts in order to create physical artworks that referenced personal symbolic imagery through abstract artifacts generated by an AI agent. While transferring the resource image from a digital file to a physical painting, I found that I was imbuing the work with the inner dialogue that flowed through my mind as I painted. The finished paintings became a visual record of my mood and experience at that time, like a visual journal entry.
To help understand my current practice, I am going to briefly break down the process I used for the first three paintings I created using the AI agent MidJourney v4 as a tool to produce resource imagery.
Masterpiece
To begin, I uploaded my original oil paintings and ceramic pieces to MidJourney, hoping that by using my own images and a single text prompt I could limit the AI’s external image referencing. I quickly learned that AI agents will still drag in external references, however, it did effectively blend my sculptural work together with my oil paintings. The first painting I created using AI to generate the reference image was the oil painting ‘Masterpiece’. The word ‘masterpiece’ was the only prompt word used along with my original source images.
I was so intrigued by the initial image generated by MidJourney that my finished oil painting did not differ too much from the generated resource. It felt weird and I was wondering how much of ‘me’ was in the final painting. I also felt the image was strangely familiar and in retrospect I can see where the AI picked up parts of the original imagery. When making this work, I started to question whether by using this tool I was employing a method of self-appropriation or AI collaboration.
Oil painting
When planning the second artwork experimenting with MidJourney, I explored the visual options AI was generating. This time, I added the text prompt ‘masterpiece’ and ‘oil painting’ to my original three images.
By the time I had finished painting ‘Oil painting’, I was feeling confused. I could see how the original works had been incorporated into the AI’s generated images, however the multitude of possibilities that the tool generated was overwhelming. My sculptural work was oddly reinterpreted as; two people, a painter and a painting, the painting creating the artist and the oil paint forming a hooded cloak around the artist. It felt accidentally insightful. I gravitated towards the last concept and reproduced the image with oil paint on canvas. I left a large section of the work unpainted, revealing the working drawing underneath the oil colour. At the time, I felt that by leaving the piece unfinished it was my way of showing my ‘hand’ in the creation of the work. The portrait subject in this piece ended up looking decidedly skeptical, which was exactly how I felt painting the work.
Clouds
Feeling more confident using the technology I began the third piece, ‘Clouds’. This time I used another sculptural piece and a number of new text prompts. I didn’t want to write a narrative for the AI, such as ‘young girl in the sky with clouds’, because I wanted the AI to use my imagery, not find/create its own. I didn’t know if this is how it worked, however that was my initial working theory.
From the initial first four images generated I drilled down on the image that had the most amount of interest for me. I scrolled through many iterations of it and pulled out areas of interest that I layered together in two rough photoshop files.
On completion of this work, I questioned how my original source images were incorporated into the final oil painting. I didn’t want to be the AI’s tool. I asked myself, where am I in this image? This prompted me to compare the original images and prompts with the finished work.
Breaking the image down I could see how my original source prompts affected the finished oil painting. Obviously, the AI generated digital images had a different quality or feeling to that of my finished work, but there was something else to it. I had ‘massaged’ the image to my way of thinking and feeling with the physical act of mark making. For example, things that I initially attributed to AI were more closely linked to elements I just genuinely liked to paint, such as the stripey sock on a pointy foot. This element was a tiny part of one of the AI’s generated images, however it stuck out to me as something I wanted to include in the final work. Now I believe that it is these little subconscious decisions made while painting the image onto canvas that show the artist’s hand in the piece.
I feel that the work I am currently creating is a deep reflection of my inner thoughts. I have always harbored an interest in surrealism. Mainly because of the connection between the surrealists and lucid dreaming, the border between the physical and metaphysical. I liken using AI to lucid dreaming and the visuals AI generates can be interpreted in the same way I interpret the memories of my dreams. It’s like I am involved in a conversation with my subconscious self through AI.
To sum up my feelings moving forward… calculators didn’t make us all mathematicians, autotune didn’t make us all singers, high tech running shoes don’t make us all athletes and image generation tools are not going to make us all artists. We will always have humans that want to create, sing, move and be human. So, as one of these compulsive humans, I will continue to push the boundaries of what and how I create physical work that contemporaneously reflects my personal experiences. Yes, these tools are a major disruption to creative industries, however we will be grappling with these emerging technologies in all areas of our lives in the future. I plan to move forward by using new technologies in my art practice and in my life in a conscious way.