I haven't posted in a couple of weeks (thank you flu!), but I've still been creating. Well, between cups of tea and Supernatural marathons. It's been a strange couple of weeks.I have enjoyed the small pops of creativity snuggled in the bits of rest, and my go-to music when I don't feel well. Vintage Bowie (Changes D1).
I spent some time working with my Starman Tarot (created by Davide DeAngeles) and just vibing along with really beautiful lyrics. Bowie will always be that strange, ambigious, androgynous, alien that literally gave no f*x about what other people thought. He created as he saw fit and he didn't care what everyone else was doing.
As an artist, I think there is definitely a lesson there. Trends come and go, but in the art world they are never really trendy, just re-emerging from a generational nap. A few years ago everyone was rediscovering fluid/flow art, collage work, and multi-medium art, but those forms of art had never really gone away. They were around decades ago in the form of various style of abstract and post-modern expressionist. Bowie clearly understood that art, like energy, is never really finished. It just changes form and re-emerges with better equipment, resources, techniques, and technology.
I recently ran across a thread condemning AI art as being disingenuous and not really art. While the art community is notorious for gatekeeping styles of art, this is mainly created from not understanding how AI art is created and not understanding that no matter how popular it is now, traditional means of creating art is constantly evolving and re-creating itself. This isn't something that is new or hasn't been done before. Digital art has been a part of the art world for decades.
In the 90's it was photo manipulation and creating fantasy art from graphics using toobs and other similar programs. That carried over well into the next century, but it also opened the door and paved the way for the technology we have now. So if you ever had a MySpace or a MSN group, you have likely been exposed to digital art. This access made a lot of artists very successful because they normally wouldn't have received that much exposure.
This is an evolving series that is created around the multi-dimensional forward-thinking and ever evolving energy that was David Bowie. This is more than just fan art and and I think if he was alive now he would love AI and probably do quite well with it. New forms of art, whether it was performance art or adding his music to a webpage (even though it took four days at least for a song to download), or painting introspective evolutionary portraits, fascinated him and once he found somethng that piqued his interest there was no stopping him until he made it distinctly his.
So, if you are out there contemplating diving into an experimental form of art and you're seeing the blow back, ask yourself What Would Bowie Do? Because odds are he would do it.
This set will be available next week in its entirety, but these two pieces are already up and available.