I have participated in the enduring phenomenon of "Team Grimmie" over that period, both through writing and various artistic projects generating memes and/or digital artistic images (mostly portraits) based on photographs of "still shots" from her many videos. Her remarkable face has led me to appreciate the delicate art of portraiture (in what ever medium it is pursued) as a way of "searching for the human face" in its unique expressiveness.
Over these past ten years, my attempts at portraiture are, at best, "incomplete," but nearly all of them fail to express the human visage — at once familiar and mysterious — with concrete precision or even in successfully evocative caricature. Christina has not been my only subject. I have accumulated a huge digital file which serves as something between a virtual wastepaper basket and a place to store partial efforts that I believe might still have some potential.
So-called tools of "artificial intelligence" have, in my experience, expedited a few technical matters but have engendered many more problems, as their "algorithmic prejudices" frustrate the intent of my particular artistic sensibility. I am not interested in generating images from descriptive words, but rather in molding the image in its "digital plasticity" which is a "hands on" work of practical design that ranges from photographic enhancement to a kind of two-dimensional digital "sculpture." I also form "natural scenes" based on my own photographs.
I'm moved by the human face, but I'm also in search of how all these new (and constantly changing) technologies might be gathered together as "materials" for a new form of genuine art. Art springs from the human urge to "make" something beautiful and the human "intuition" that guides and governs (with an often unyielding sternness) the creative process. Ultimately, the artist him-or-her-self must must be contented with the completion of the work. No technical "tricks" or shortcuts can substitute for the discrete prompting that leads the artist to construct a work of art as a personal expression.
When it first appeared more than a century ago, photography was spurned by "real artists," and it took generations for the photographic medium to become widely used and recognized as a crafted image of personal expression and communication. Digital programs and AI will certainly improve their capacity to "generate pictures." But an artist remains frustrated insofar as an “independent process” replaces his or her own personal involvement — the "work" of bringing forth something beautiful from "within" but also "incarnated" through an engagement with external materials. An algorithmic fabrication of a picture — even a good picture — is something essentially different from an artistic work in which I have in some significant manner invested myself. It may seem that AI can do “everything” to make a great picture, but the artist feels no connection to these pictures, and becomes frustrated and bored. I still believe the artist can gather these technological materials and make something “different,” some that is — in a certain sense — “original,” even if the artist is the only one who “sees” it. Eventually, vivid new forms may be recognized more generally, and others will be able to distinguish genuine personal artistic expressions of beauty from AI’s mass-collated-data “imitations.”
Christina Grimmie wrote music, which I also did in my youth and may yet return to. But for now, she inspires me to wrestle with a brave new world of pictorial art, seeking human faces as I have "seen" them — which remains more difficult than it might seem, but remains an artistic task that I find worth discovering and cultivating.