Making babies with Egon Shiele and Others
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Blending Egon Schiele with other inspirational artists. AI is a fascinating venture into the creative process. In one particular exploration, I wanted to see if I could get a more closer, more intimate take on Egon’s aesthetic. Enter the incredible Alyssa Monks, a painter whose oils I admire.
Monks’ intimate close-ups, a stark contrast to Egon’s approach, add a new layer of depth. The AI-generated images, merging Egon’s distinctive style with Monks’ conceptual focus on proximity, resulted in unique compositions. These are intimate, almost voyeuristic scenes, where figures appear both near and distant, a fusion of Schiele’s raw expressiveness with Monks’ approach to capturing human vulnerability.
This process raises an intriguing question about the ethics and nature of art creation.
Is it appropriate to use AI to merge the styles of distinct artists to forge new aesthetics?
This query taps into the heart of the artistic process—how artists draw inspiration from various influences and meld them into something uniquely theirs. The AI, in this case, acts as a facilitator, accelerating and expanding the creative possibilities. However, it also blurs the lines of artistic ownership and originality.
My personal take tends to lean into the larger (largest picture, really) of the universe – That inspite the feeling of being an original creator, in the end we are all a part of a succession of people who came before us, and we are just here for a shot period of time to exist and hopefully leave this world more inspired for the next round of people who come along. Claiming credit for a “style” would be akin to someone owning the recipe to Apple Pie: It’s not exactly in humanities best interest in the long run to feel entitled to something we all contribute to (HARD NOTE: I do no condone copying styles and taking credit as your own work. This is simply to state that inspiration and information should be shared and trying to claim an artistic style isn’t exactly how the universe works… It’s simply too big and too complex and we don’t even know if we’re on a timeline or in a quantum universe.
In the end, these AI-crafted images represent something that might never have existed otherwise: a confluence of Egon’s expressionist techniques with Alyssa’s intimate close-ups. They stand as testament to the possibilities and dilemmas presented by AI in the creative process, offering a fresh perspective on how art evolves and is interpreted through the lens of technology.
