Photoreal Experiments

I like joining technique and sensibility. Intuition and thinking.
I like Pollocks' phrase about the artist creating with time and space and not wanting to illustrate but  to express. 

SOUL AND SPACE

When an image is large enough but has a “center” that draws the eye, it immediately creates an enveloping, immersive feeling.

Open space is not empty space. It is what surrounds us. It always surrounds something, and reflects it.

Here Tamzyn inhabits that space and alters it in her own way:

I’ve also been trying to capture more of what we call “soul” in this kind of image. You know, when people say an image has soul or not.

I don’t think it comes from the medium used, or from specific tricks. It’s not about whether the eyes look at the camera, or whether the pose is loose and natural. It’s many things.

It’s more that what is represented connects with something that was already in our mind.

Then we recognize it. It feels so natural that it’s already familiar. It’s like that because even if it’s fantasy, it’s real.

Real in the sense that it has its own existence, its own structure. It reacts, poses, expresses on its own.

It doesn’t obey our will; it has something it reveals by itself.

So you have to give it freedom, so that this archetypal being can manifest.

For this, generative art is ideal. When I invoke Tamzyn, I simply define colors and shapes, places like this mountain, but then she manifests through the spell-training I built over months.

REASON IS NOT THE WAY

I think people aren’t getting the most out of generative art because they focus on technical stuff, when the right way is this:

• Use intuition, not thought. Use unexpected and unorthodox associations.
• Train your own concepts and styles from your own material. Then mix those concepts together.
• Look for your style, not for cold realism. No one wants realism. Reality is boring.
• Basically, stop thinking like an engineer. Aim to create something beautiful, not something real. Express, don’t illustrate. Don’t seek perfection, seek feeling.

These new tools are tools for the artist. They are the peak of creation,  where we can take the skills we already had and push them further.

Yes, it's annoying that some people can flood the world with junk, but they’ll get tired. In a few years no one will be doing that. 

And many creative people will keep making beauty. Everyone will stop arguing and just create whatever they want, the way they like. 

When that happens, these tools will simply be one more tool we can use to create.

When you create, you’re not making an image. You’re creating a world. Some artists use generative tools and create worlds, and others just create images. Same with painters. It’s not about how difficult or easy a tool is, but about how much you can get from it in terms of expression, immersion, and making people (and yourself) imagine.

I think the problem with generative tools is that even the people who use them don’t see them as artistic. And maybe they’re right in the same way a pencil isn’t artistic unless you use it for drawing instead of poking your ear.

THE MOUNTAIN

And then she looks at the camera, poses, plays with the nature around her. She does what she wants. We see her pointed ears, and if you zoom in, her eyes the color of dark ivy leaves, almost black.

These images have something dreamlike, and something joyful. The joy of a simple world and of a figure that is a myth. Not from this world, but from collective memory. That’s what a nymph is: beauty, joy, and nature.

I know a lot of this may sound like rambling, but hey, it’s my blog! :D

I often wonder about the meaning of things like this. What we understand as eternal, as beautiful, as natural. These images are like looking through a window and seeing it.