I have restarted our Zoom Peer Critique group, which feels great. I forgot how much I need my fellow artists to have eyes on my work. And also how much I get from looking at their work and hearing the group talk about the work. It is a low key beginning as many are busy this fall.
Meanwhile I am trying to find myself again artistically. It is hard. I feel like MidJourney and Dall-e both resulted in a bit of shut-down for me. I am not sure why they should shut me down any more than my seeing work created by another artist would. There is just something so weird about being able to have an image rendered in another artists style so effortlessly. And the way the AI can produce a rendering so easily using a specific perspective or palette. And yet the images always seem to be lacking in some way that I can’t quite put my finger on. I would love to take a bunch of AI Generated images and hang them up for Joel to analyze. Maybe this winter I will join a class or two and can do that.
I also feel like some of my success and failure that I had this summer has contributed to my feeling a bit shutdown. Intellectually I know that I should not think at all about what curators or jurors want and I should just make my art. But it is hard to see some work get praised and other work, which I feel is more where I want to go, be rejected. I am super glad that Alignment Problem was hanging this summer because I feel that it speaks so well to the issues I want to address in my work.
So I have returned to scissors and messes and energy. The drawing below was made on election day. The messy state of the planet was on my mind.
