Category: Art

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The Hitchhiker

This is one of my favorite paintings, done in…1979?

Getting a version from ChatGPT took a lot of work. A dozen iterations and it's still not exactly what I want, but it's damn close.

For some reason it really wanted to put the guy in the road instead of off to one side.  The trouble is, with each generation it changes the car itself.

By the time I finally got the perspective right, and the hitchhiker the proper distance down the road, the vehicle had completely morphed into something that bore little resemblance to my original painting.

Maybe the guy just can't get picked up, and these are all separate cars…

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I Don't Know If I Should Be Flattered Or Outraged

Prompt: Make photorealistic using color palette of original image. Place two suns in the sky and make both characters male.

My original painting from 1979.
How ChatGPT interpreted it.
My original painting from 1980.
ChatGPT's version.
My sketch from 1977.
Chat GPT's interpretation.
My painting from 1985*
How ChatGPT sees it.

I know what I'm going to be doing for a while.

That being said, ChatGPT does manage to come close to my original vision for these pieces, although it misses details here and there. I don't hate them, and truth be told I'm kinda surprised at just how good they all turned out. I'm sure I can get them even better if I add more to the prompts.

*This was painting based off what came to me in a meditation one afternoon. I was sunning myself on the deck of an ancient Egyptian vessel in the Mediterranean, when all of a sudden I heard a strange noise in the distance and saw the white vehicle appear on the horizon and fly overhead.

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ChatGPT

Prompt: Make this photorealistic.

My original sketch from 1977.
GPT's photorealistic version.
My original sketch from 1977.
GPT's photorealistic version.

I don't hate them…

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The Weird and Wonderful (World) of AI Art

Kind of reminds me of the works of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag (whose work I adore, by the way).

If you like the look of this, check out The Electric State (Netflix) and Tales From The Loop (Amazon Prime); both projects where Stålenhag was directly involved. And Tales also features the music of Philip Glass. 😉

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I Won't Say It's My Muse, But…

Among my iTunes to MD transfers yesterday was Philip Glass' Satyagraha. I first heard this piece leaking through a wall I shared with a Folsom Street neighbor in San Francisco sometime in 1988 or thereabouts. I didn't know what it was—and this was long before Shzam and SoundHound (hell, I hadn't even bought my first modem at that point) were around to identify songs—but I recognized Philip Glass' unmistakable signature and went next door to finally meet the hunky neighbor who'd moved in a few weeks earlier and find out what was playing.

(Finding fellow Glass aficionados is pretty rare, TBH.)

Like nearly all of Philip's work, Satyagraha just plays me, but this one in particular—possibly more than even Akhnaten or the Koyannisqatsi soundtrack—reaches in on a deep, fundamental level. I haven't listened to this in years, but it was calling out to me as I scrolled through my library in search of things I wanted to transfer to physical media. I got about halfway through listening last night before my body was demanding sleep, but in that time—oh boy—it still packed a punch.

I won't go so far as to say this recording is my muse, but many, many years ago I put it on one day after I got home from a particularly stressful day at work, and by the time we got to Act 2 – Tagore, Scene 1 the music was all but screaming at me to get off my butt, pull out a blank canvas that had been gathering dust in a closet for months, and start painting.

This was the result of that push:

"Joe" (2004)

I won't say the music had the same effect on me last night as it did twenty-one years ago, but damn if it didn't clear away cobwebs, sweep away years worth of accumulated emotional and mental gunk, and as the woo-woo crowd might say, "aligned my chakras."

Postscript 3/26/25: Well, it seems I've written about this before. If it sounded vaguely familliar to any of my long-time readers, thank youfor not pointing it out and making me feel even more addled than I do for discovering it myself.  I wonder how many duplicate subjects I've covered in the 20 years of this blog. Probably more than I care to know…