My Small Paintings & A.I. Fine Art

At the start of 2020, I took on the task of creating 100 paintings, each a four-inch square landscape oil painting. I wanted to make each of them unique in some sort of way, so I made them from my imagination for the most part. The reason for this was my belief at the time in the phrase “Practice makes Perfect.” It was a great learning experience and grew my relationship with painting greatly. The Instagram page I made for this commitment is still up and can be found here. The one thing that will seem most off about this page is the fact that I stopped at 99 paintings, one short of 100. There is definitely some deep message to be said about this, but I’ll leave that up to you.

Earlier this summer, I began a new series of paintings when I created 24 two-inch square landscapes (I insist that you pull out a ruler to understand the size of these paintings.) This series was in direct response to my earlier project and was an opportunity to gauge my ability. The difference in difficulty between these two-inch pieces and the four-inch ones is like night and day. These smaller pieces were far easier and less stressful for a wide range of reasons. For starters, I made these simultaneously, gathered references ahead of time, and, of course, they are a quarter of the size. But the major difference is in how I gathered my references; with artificial intelligence.

When I run out of my photos, I make an effort to ethically and legally source some of my references using sites that distribute free stock photos. Furthermore, in search of incorporating new technologies into my creative process, I have come across the NVIDIA Research AI Playground’s interactive demo, GauGAN2 Beta. This AI develops landscapes. All 24 of my new small paintings are directly inspired by my interactions with this AI, and I have one larger piece in the works with the AI’s output as the primary reference.

Here is what I learned from this experience. It took hours of tinkering to start finding results that worked for me, and even then, I would only find a worthwhile reference that speaks to me every hundred or so. The same goes for stock photos, but the process with stock photos is far more engaging once you get into the groove of things. AI is not perfect; it is not the messiah of art that will replace everything. It is a tool. It is stupendous at what it does, which is following a task and providing an output. It compiles this output from pre-existing photos. It will not replace all art to come, as art not yet made is, of course, not part of the AIs’ database.

As it stands now, AI art can not create the art that I want to make. It is possible it never will in my lifetime. We’ll have to see.