Painting and Book Illustration
So much is new that I hardly know where to begin. After a period of letting go and reducing things, there is suddenly work to show again: a small painting, a book and a few experiments in presentation.
I have no particular agenda, apart from praising myself now and then, of course. Whether someone responds to the pictures, to Dao and Zen, or to the thoughts I attach to them is beyond my control. I would like to offer something to chew on, alongside whatever pleasure the paintings themselves may give.
The AI-assisted presentations have led to some misunderstandings, so I want to be clear about what I am doing. My paintings grow out of a dialogue between myself, my philosophical concerns and the painting surface. Whether I work in oil, ink or mixed media is secondary to that encounter.
Presenting the finished work is another part of an artist’s job. Here I am happy to use new tools, including AI, to explore settings, lighting and arrangements. The rooms in these presentations are virtual. They are ways of imagining an encounter with the paintings, rather than records of actual installations.
Presentation 1: A Small Painting
For this experiment I chose a work from 2022, made with different inks on paper and measuring about 20 × 30 cm. It may not inspire love at first sight in everyone. That made it a useful choice for the exercise: small enough to seem unassuming, but big enough for our game.
The clip tries out ways of placing this small work in an imagined setting. The painting itself remains the starting point. What changes is the room around it, and perhaps the relationship a viewer forms with it. The virtual presentation should not be taken as a reliable guide to its physical scale.
If the player does not load, watch the small-painting presentation on VideoPress.
The possibilities multiply quickly. The harder task is to keep the picture in view and leave the gimmicks alone. Even with these helpful tools, it somehow always turns into work.
Presentation 2: Book Illustrations
Shortly before I wrote this in September 2023, Wolfgang Kubin and I presented his Das Buch der Zähren: Swatower Oden, Wiener Elegien in Vienna. I had the pleasure of illustrating it. In the earlier post about the project, I described the challenge of choosing works for reproduction in black and white.
Black and white has its own attraction. For this presentation, however, I wanted interested readers to see the illustrations in colour, placed in virtual interiors. It is another view of the same work, rather than a replacement for the printed book.
Watch the book-illustration presentation on YouTube.
And finally, I will try not to turn every post into a discussion of AI. Where I include further experiments of this kind, I intend to place them at the end as an extra. The pictures should still have the first word.
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