A year or two ago, if you’d asked, I would have suggested that yes, eventually, software and robots will take all our jobs. The only jobs that were potentially safe were the purely creative ones: writers, painters, musicians, artists of one kind or another. But this year I started painting, and recently I began collaborating with deep neural networks as part of my artistic process. Now I can see that the future seldom runs in a straight line from the present; it usually ends up being far more nuanced, with twists and turns that are only apparent and obvious in hindsight. Integrating an AI into my artistic process has enhanced my work and made me a better painter too.

Part of my current artistic process is to work with photos. So far I’ve used family photos or found photos with compositions that I find appealing. I’m especially drawn to scenes with anonymous figures who have their backs turned or their faces fully or partially obscured, and those are the types of things that I’ve painted. Here are a couple of example paintings from early this year:

“Wildwood 66” 34.5cm x 29.5cm acrylic and ink on wood.

“Wildwood 66” is based on a photo taken of my Aunt and Uncle at the beach in Wildwood, New Jersey in 1966, before I was born. In the photo my Aunt and Uncle stand prominently in the foreground, and in the background there are numerous figures heading into and coming out of the waves.

When I started working with this image I removed my Aunt and Uncle entirely, and in that way removed any personal connection I had to it; it’s those background figures that I love. They’re uninhibited because they aren’t the subject of the photo or even aware it’s being taken; they’re anonymous and many of them are likely dead; each one had or has a life that’s probably just beyond our ability to know anything about. All we have is the photograph that gives us a tiny slice of them in that one moment. After a couple of test paintings I took the background figures that I loved the most and composed them into an idealistic, nostalgic and ultimately weird landscape where even when they’re together, they’re separate.

“Haver in a pink lawn chair” 24" x 24" acrylic on canvas.

This is a self-portrait, based on a photo taken by my wife. “Haver” is my internal art-persona. He is a honey-badger who doesn’t stop and who only thinks in 100 painting increments. He’s also a way for me to anonymize the idea of myself as a subject (Haver’s beard is much fuller than my own). Again there’s a disconnect between the subject and the background or landscape; in this case I was exploring the idea of personal acceptance.

Part way through the year I bought a brown bag full of photos for $5. I didn’t pick and choose the photos, I just shovelled them into the bag from a giant bin in a junk store, happy with the idea that they would provide me with many new subjects and compositions. I was right; they were mostly vacation photos from the late 90s and early 2000s. Here’s a painting based on one of the compositions that really appealed to me:

”It’s ok, everybody only thinks about themselves anyway” 30" x 22" acrylic and ink on wood

I removed, simplified and flattened almost everything from the original photo. I only kept a small number of figures that I liked, again totally anonymous people, and put them in water that enhances their separation from each other, even when they’re together.

Enter the AI

Early in June I discovered style-transfer and neural-style. They’re both applications of a neural algorithm that analyzes an artistic style and then applies it to a photograph. I immediately wanted to use them to apply the style of some of my own paintings to the found photos that I’d planned to paint. Of the two, I’ve found neural-style to be more feature rich; it allows you to blend multiple style images and to produce photos at various points in the processing. Given that processing an image can take many hours, this is a big advantage because you can see relatively early whether something is going to work or not. Sometimes the earlier iterations of the process end up being more interesting as well. Here’s neural-style, doing it’s thing to a selfie based on the style of one of my paintings:

Once I got the algorithm software installed and tested, I took a beautiful found photo of two anonymous figures heading towards a bus in northern Canada and applied the style of “Haver in a pink lawn chair” to it.