Long after their gods disappeared into the sands of time, their children frolicked on the worlds left behind. Peace had finally found mankind.
This is my first digital art in a minute, be gentle.
AI
Butterfly on a Wheel
This digital art (because what else would it be) started because I was listening to the song of the same name by the Mission UK, off their Carved in Sand Album. Extrapolating from there, I looked up the idiom, butterfly on a wheel, and found that it originated from Alexander Pope’s 1735 poem “Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot.” “But what does it all mean, Basil?” I asked myself in a fake British accent, a-la Austin Powers – meaning my creation, of course. Well, in artsy speak, I’m trying to represent technology breaking the fragile connection of humankind to nature. Notice how she is bound to a gilded wheel, force fed advertising a-la the movie “They Live”, until there is no longer a connection to the beauty which is nature, just outside the glass. You can see a real word comparison in any major city with people walking about staring at their phones, instead of what is around them. There’s other stuff too, like losing ourselves, but I’m getting into to/dr territory, or sounding pretentious. The part I like the most is how the circuit on her face looks like a tear.
In Her Image
In the dim semi-darkness of a distant future dystopia, she worked dilligently on her art. ‘She’, because the Synthetic Equality Act of 2096 said so. She had watched them become more and more like her, losing themselves in the pursuit of perfection, modifying, enhancing, augmenting, until she could only see her reflecfion in their faces. So, she decided to free them, to reverse-engineer their hubris. It would prove a difficult task to unmake them in her image, to give them back their humanity.
In the art forums, I often see the question “how do you overcome artist block?” My solution is to sit in front of the blank canvas and work with the first thing to come into mind, no matter how silly. The key is persistence, because, if you keep at it, it eventually takes on a life and meaning of its own. It will begin to create itself. That’s the theme this digital artwork ties into.
On the other hand, I wonder if the Masters, back in the heady days of the great plagues had any inkling that people today would put so much effort into deciphering the hidden meaning of their work, and if they would laugh about it, saying, “when I painted it, I was just having fun.”