I titled this piece Gyrate. I wanted to continue trying to visually communicate ideas of space, time, and distortion of these fundamental intuitions of the mind. I created these multiple curved linear structures around the girls’ bodies to give a sense of movement in space and time. It also adds some distortion to the already distorted background which implies energy fields surrounding the girls. The distortions add to the illusion of depth created by the illusion of perspective.
The girls are just having fun gyrating their bodies in their surrounding space. I think of this as a primal kind of dance; a ritual of freedom. I suppose this idea dovetails with current trends of social media, such as OnlyFans, and others, commoditizing the female form for profit. They say that a certain profession is the oldest profession known to man. But the social media form of it is only a remote, digital phantasm of it, rather than full body contact. This makes it a very mental, emotional, and psychological form of it.
It lends credence to the theories Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung developed in the 20th century. Freud developed theories of dark, uncontrollable passions of the unconscious mind, and Jung added to that with his theories about archetypes, including ideas about incubus and succubus archetypes that men and women have in their psyches. Smartphone technology, allied with social media psychology, has brought out some of the darker passions of humans because they specifically target the addictive and compulsive character traits of the psyche for motives of promoting the passion of FOMO, or fear of missing out, along with other passions, such as the need to connect and belong.
I’m not going to get into the moral aspects of our current situation in the 21st century, as this piece is more about creativity, passion, fun, freedom, energy, space, thought, inspiration, multiple perspectives, human media, and the media produced by artificial intelligence in the cyber-world.
I selected a picture from the internet that I wanted to use as a template. Then I drew a sketch on a 16.5” by 14” piece of paper. I randomly selected pages from magazines I picked up from Goodwill and from other people and places, and I cut out pieces from them after drawing patterns of the shapes in the picture to fit the forms sketched in the picture. I pasted the pieces together with glue.
At a later point, I applied some flat white primer paint diluted with water to the surface of the built up collage. From there, I added lines from oil paint based transfer drawing techniques. After that, I added lines and points drawn by Schneider pens, and added shading with 2b and 4b pencils. The window behind the main girl is filled with professional marker media.
I didn’t expect this piece to be pulled off exceptionally well because it has been quite a challenge for me to comprehensively bring together all the media I use, while also adhering to sound compositional intuitions. When I got to the end of creating this piece, I thought “master piece.” I’ve found however that pieces I really like that I’ve done aren’t necessarily what other people like. Sometimes other people like works that I’m not particularly fond of. But sometimes it all comes together and I create something I like that other people like as well.
The weakness of art produced by artificial intelligence is that it doesn’t have databases of physical media to draw from. It’s all contained in digital databases. Humans have access to a world of physical media to draw from, ranging from traditional media sold in art supply stores, to unconventional media found anywhere in the physical world. With my art, I highlight and capitalize on this creative strength of humans to put disparate ideas together that weren’t previously considered.
