Digital version from my book Art Saves Lives (out of print) of some of my early handmade chapbooks: a sewn felt seed pouch, painted with watercolour and written with black Rotring .25 drawing pen. The handwriting was use for the Jules-te-reo font. I still have the vase which held the arum lillies.
I am learning how to use AI to work with the things I want to do with my art. I am already creative.
It really goes beyond ChatGPT, for example, I am interested in using artificial intelligence for working with my own audio, photo, video and design work. I am learning how to harness midjourney, dream by Wombo, playground AI for editing, lexica for search and adobe firefly. There is D-ID for photos which talk, REImagine AI for interior design, tryReplay for transformation of voice and for text to speech, wellsaid Labs. Then there are music production tools. I consider mastering these tools as the ultimate in DIY.
I do not want to use anyone else’s art as I have plenty of my own.
I think this urge to create things from scratch is a family thing. My brother, a creative genius in his own way, once caught a fish, arranged it on a plate, took a beautiful photo, then developed the photo in his own darkroom. He then built a frame and framed it. He made several and gave them to us before he left New Zealand. He never lived here again and is now a British Citizen. I still have that gift.
This website is all about my lifelong joy of production. My joy with managing a project from start to finish. In my reading room, I have a vanity shelf of some of my projects. I sit on my chaise which overlooks my garden where I have scented roses which I planted and mosaic tiles which I made. Beyond that is the greenhouse I constructed for growing vegetables. Beyond that is the fence I built to contain my 8 chickens and 4 ducks (who all have names and big personalities, by the way). In that area are the native trees I planted and the pond I edged and the pathways made of recycled pallets. Within that area are also the two chicken huts I built. Did I mention I have taken up woodwork?
I enjoy thinking up ideas, planning them, creating them (either by hand or by print on demand/vanity publishing) and having the results whether that is a wooden chicken house or a book or a painting for me to sit in my reading room and admire. I usually give my hand-made gifts away.
Maybe the things I make are meaningless to anyone else. For example, I am not famous, or rich which society says is the point of making stuff, to commercialise it is part of capitalism. However to make something go viral and monetise it has never been motivation to me, I just like to create for creation’s sake, preferably from scratch. Right down to designing the typeface. Yes, some things I have produced are on Amazon and Redbubble if anyone else wants it. But I make no real attempt to promote or market it. Once I have finished a project, I am usually on to the next thing.
If the above links to my products do not work, it is because I have already taken them down which I sometimes do when I am over them.
I do not know what will happen to the things I made (which are on my vanity shelf) when I die. (My family has a history of living beyond the age of 100 so this is likely to be a few years off.) I hope my creations do not go into landfill, but the reality is that in the end, everything ends up as rubbish.
Speaking of rubbish, I do not want to use AI to make the so-called AI-slop which is out in the world. I like to create for the sake of it, for my own pleasure. Just as I use Amazon to create a hardcopy of a children’s picture book I wrote many years ago or when I was studying Children’s Literature at the University of Canterbury, or Redbubble to produce a jigsaw of a painting I did in the 80s, if AI can be part of using my own work to create or explore further possibilities, I am all for it.
For one thing, I want to use AI to produce an app to document/portfolio my clothes, or my sewing fabrics, or maybe all the art I have created. To make it more useable for me. Mainly for my own personal use, as everything I have ever produced over the years has been.
I still love analogue though, there is just something beautiful about being able to hold in my hands the art that I make, hence my own planners for the various things I create during this sweet life of mine.