To distract myself, I've been working with images in ChatGPT. Most of the time, I am told that what I have requested lies outside the boundaries of what it can create, then--BOOM!--it will surprise me. The prompts, though, have made me think much more than I ever have about the painting techniques and styles of painters as I try to recall paintings I have loved. It is an almost academic exercise, remembering, querying, describing. Much of the time I am extremely frustrated with the guardrails of censorship. The Nazis burned the works of the Weimar painters. Xi has censored almost all imagery in China in much the manner of the old Soviets and their offspring, Putin. Freedom is too precious. Art will make you feel and think things. Artist's have always had to tiptoe their way through the minefield.
But sometimes, if I get lucky with the prompts, an image will appear.
Right now, it is better than anything else happening in my world.
There is another upside to this, though. I think of making portraits again, but with different questions to answer. That is how I am beginning to see a portrait now, a question to be answered. Or, perhaps only pondered. What is important to the subject? What do they wish to express? What unconscious, unspoken desires can you get to take shape?
And of course, there is everything that surrounds that, the light, the mood, the tone, and all the technical questions about how to achieve that. The photographer must envy the painter in that as a painter must envy a musician. How can we evoke a reaction that resounds the way a set of notes so obviously can, or, in the case of the painter, complex daubs of color?
I have been working through these questions in my mind rather than thinking of the troubles at hand. It is an evasion, but it is something else, too.
I'll end with some music, another suggestion of the algorithms. I am living in a world of algorithms, it seems, visual and aural. But they do not hinder me, I think, but drive my imagination.
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