Let’s remember the speed of a human artist. In a time when generative AI can make you a photo-realistic image or painting in the style of a particular artist in seconds, I’ve created a painting of generative AI over 4 months.

What you see here is a culmination of a 6-month process of sketches and proof of concepts to bring together my visualisation of generative AI. Although I have a full-time career in technology, I’ve found for my own mindfulness that I must let the two exist together. This is a 100cm painting depicting the workflow of working with generative AI services from broad stroke requests and flowing into potentially complex responses from different data sources and narratives.

I’ve depicted repetition and recursion, the embrace of large language models and the framework of the response. My choice of colours represents the context and subject that should be at the heart of the request we make of any gen AI service.
If you zoom close into the texture of the painting, you’ll see the weave style I use to put the paint onto the canvas using a squared off palette knife. Even at a macro level there are vectors, decisions and paths being made to dictate what the target outcome will be. Things to also notice include the symbols in the bottom left, the silver sections on the left and right hand side of the painting and the large archway in the middle. That last one is key to understanding the nature of the cubist abstract work I’ve been doing over the past few years.

When image creation can be as easy as a simple prompt that takes seconds to generate, working at a human pace is what keeps me just that.