Description
Open Edition Generative Mesh Painting, created with p5.js with AI code assistant.
8000 x 8000 px
300dpi
New code-based mesh paintings are created using p5.js. I’m not a coder, but I learnt the basics of code many years ago, mostly for web development, so I understand some of the principles of code. However, generative art code development has always been out of reach for me, beyond my skill set. So, as part of my AI experimentation I started to explore the use of AI to support the creative coding process, which was a huge gamechanger for me. Exploring these new generative mesh paintings is a natural next step/iteration of my arts practice. It's taken over 2 decades of art and mesh painting experimentation to get to this point.
Short overview of my mesh painting practice.
My art practice has an ongoing interest in shared memories, how we remember the past, people, places, buildings, objects and things that have come to the end of their lives, appear and disappear, or are unobtainable or defunct. How we make new from old.
The mesh painting process has a similar aesthetic to tapestry and cross stitch. I've always been interested in handmade crafts and traditional art and craft movement and love to see homemade cross stitch designs in local charity shops.
Initially the mesh painting process came from art school experimentation combined with living next to this huge billboard. I used to watch the guys putting up billboard posters with glue and paper. I loved seeing the old poster being ripped away, and I often collected the discarded fragments of posters. I used these fragments to create collages. I had this idea of using paint to fill the gaps between the fragments and began to use mesh as a way to create a sort of pixelated appearance.
I’ve always enjoyed working across art mediums and technologies. My art practice consists of painting, print, drawing, sculpture, site-specific installation and video. Over the years my art practice has been focused primarily on painting, a process achieved by pushing acrylic paint through perforated aluminum mesh, resulting in a pixelated image, which resembles a cross between a tapestry and a lithography print. My art practice has been continually influenced by exploration of the interplay between the handmade and the machine.
Maintaining an art studio long-term can be seen as a luxury in regard to space, cost, time, family commitments and availability, especially in London. Many artist communities across London have been lost to gentrification. And following my own eviction from an artist-run studio space in London (now luxury flats) I stopped making physical mesh paintings.
However, the subsequent closure of the manufacturer of the perforated aluminum mesh material went out of business, and I couldn’t find anything similar anywhere. Secondly, the acrylic paint supplier also went out of business - I used pots of Spectrum paints, and it was ideal for its consistency, the way it dried - it was perfect. I tried all the other acrylic paint brands, and nothing worked the same way, so I stopped painting for a few years.
In 2020, I started experimenting with digital tools to replicate my mesh painting process. I replicated the perforated mesh in Blender 3d so I could try recreating the physical mesh painting process in Virtual Reality using this new digital mesh canvas and virtual paint. And later working with AI technologies.
The move into AI (artificial intelligence) as an art medium felt very much like a natural continuum of my artistic journey. I‘ve experimented with various AI and generative adversarial network (GAN) tools since 2021. My approach has been low tech, fueled by curiosity.
I’m not in any way a technical genius, I like to find and use tools which are easy to use and accessible, which I think is related to my work as an art school educator.
For my Artificial Mesh Paintings, I’m interested in exploring ways AI technology can align with my creative conceptual and aesthetic expectations, as well as enriching the overall connection to my art making practice.
Exploring AI text prompts was a useful process that made me more aware of the structure and workings of AI. From this point I was more interested in what datasets were being referenced to make these images and their origin.
I was keen to try and create my own bespoke dataset, so I gathered all my digital artworks from over the three years, including 100s of mesh paintings (Created in VR and Blender 3D), some minted but many un-minted as experiments or not quite ready for sharing. Once I had the images in a single folder, it was easy to train my own bespoke model and dataset using Runway ai.
With my new bespoke data set I had the freedom to explore new abstract and figurative compositions and subject matter, way beyond the constraints of my digital mesh painting process.