My Dad, who grew up as a struggling artists during the 60’s and 70’s, is very much a product of his era. His often wacky and out there style of painting often raises eyebrows. But it’s the subject matter that’s wacky, his ability to paint is a dying art. He learnt to paint like the classical artists. But post 60’s and 70’s when modern art and contemporary art was less about skill with a paint brush, less about colour theory and more about narratives. He refused to comply. For him, painting was still about theory, skill, perspective, and a sharp eye. This left him out in the sidelines. It was old fashioned and elitist to be actually good at painting. His passion for painting led him to shun the last few decades and do his own thing.
Which in some ways was good for him, he could paint care-free, unbounded by the latest fads and crazes. He would feel dishonest splatting random colours of paint on a canvas and selling it for thousands of pounds, coming up with some BS about how each splash of colour represented some cause. Life forced his hand to become an art teacher, where he taught unruly kids how to draw the best South Park characters and cannabis leaves they ever drew.
Recently I showed him ChatGPT’s image generation. He’s constantly looking for sources of inspiration, he has stacks of Japanese game art magazines. He’s in his mid 70’s and has never played a computer game in his life, but was drawn to the style and skill of game art. It seemed to be one of the last bastions of expert artists using actual skill. So when he saw ChatGPT spew out high quality scenes almost exactly as he’d imagined in his head, he instantly saw the value and potential.
“An elephant blowing bubbles that look like worlds” he said with a shrug, not expecting much. Several seconds later, he was looking at the following image with a few mystified blinks. He’s a complete technophobe, so he wouldn’t even begin to understand how my phone just generated this thought more clearer and more concrete than he could imagine (even with his incredibly imaginative brain). Two days later, I was sat looking at a painting of an elephant blowing bubbles into worlds. He’d taken some creative license and shifted the bubbles around to make them look more random. He’d also painted the elephant with a level of realism that you could almost feel its rough skin and hear it calling out to the rest of its herd.
There was something different about this painting, it didn’t quite look like his other paintings. It was somehow more vivid, the arrangement and colours it generated seemed somehow more like something that would sell. We discussed it and came to the conclusion that, because AI draws from all human output, it picked an arrangement and colour scheme that fit perfectly with our subconscious preferences. For example, it used shades of blue and light pink that I see all the time in the street photography world. In essence, ChatGPT knew exactly what colours and arrangement would appeal to us the most. Something my Dad admitted he was disconnected from to some degree. In his own words, his mind is so out there that he wouldn’t have considered using those colours, and using that arrangement or composition.
ChatGPT essentially brought my Dad’s painting back into something that would be understood subconsciously by most people, and not what fit into his personal and eclectic tastes. He even got to use a tube of Prussian Blue paint I’d bought him a few Christmases ago, which he apologised for having little use for. It turns out the human eye actually quite enjoys Prussian Blue for night skies.
I posted the picture on Instagram and I immediately had a flood of likes and messages from friends saying how amazing it was. Someone even enquired about wanting a print of it for his daughters bedroom wall. Often people don’t buy my Dad’s paintings because they would look odd on their wall. But not this painting. So he managed to paint something in his own style, using his own idea, still using his 60+ years of experience to improve upon and paint well, that suddenly piqued peoples interests and imaginations. Suddenly, he painted something people felt not only comfortable having on their bedroom walls, but wanted on their bedroom walls.
Essentially, AI helped unlock and tap into popular themes or clichés as my Dad called it, that his highly creative brain had veered away from. In a practical sense, the image is completely unique, there’s no copyright issue, and the original idea still came from his imagination. He pondered that perhaps it was cheating in some way. But I reminded him that most artists aren’t painting from their imagination like he often is, they’re painting from photos or scenes. Using AI just made his original idea more concrete, whilst picking colours and compositions that people resonate with. It removed some of the guess work. My Dad also wasn’t entirely painting from his imagination, he was cobbling together various images he’d cut out from magazines and various reference photos my mum would sometimes print off for him. He would also often photograph people in the street who were dressed in some form of costume. For instance, someone larping as Hagrid from Harry Potter would get accosted by my Dad in the street for an impromptu photoshoot.
AI made this process a breeze, it did all of this for him, in just a few seconds. You could argue that his process of cobbling together reference images and combining them into a scene of his imagination is somewhat lost using AI, and there’s a charm to think about the people in his paintings, being real people somewhere. And to chuckle at the thought of where he found this wizard (although he has a habit of painting himself in as all the wizards, which has amused his friends and family over the years). But he still uses reference photos alongside AI images to make them more personal, and more real. As ChatGPT tends to generate slightly cartoonish looking images. So there’s still a degree of personal touch to his AI inspired paintings.
If you want to show my Dad some love and support, or if you just like his work, you can buy prints from here: https://studiovalentine.bigcartel.com/ or see some of his other original works here: https://studiovalentine.co.uk/
