a feeling i can’t put my finger on

Digital, AI, Acrylic Collage.

Minted upon request for @CozomoMedici.

This piece is comprised of several layers of dried acrylic skins, photographed and digitally mixed into abstractions. These acrylic skins were the "castoff" paint of other fluid paintings--the drips and pools that overflowed from the sides of the canvas and were considered "waste," traditionally left to dry and dispose of before the next session. I manipulated this "wasted" paint while still wet with brushes, straws, and toothpicks, creating vivid, blooming flowers.

The acrylic blooms are layered over a face created with Artificial Intelligence. As with all my portraiture, this face has a small percentage (~7%) of my own trained into it via GAN.

The hand-painted gold detailing speaks to the practice of Kintsugi (金継ぎ), a Japanese art that mends broken pottery with gold, silver, or platinum. Philosophically, this practice venerates imperfection, fate, and acceptance of radical change, and celebrates shattering and repair as a part of the history of the object, resulting in a more interesting and beautiful work than before it was ever broken.

The chaos and intentionality of these methods come together into a feeling I am unable to fully articulate--because it is new to me. Self-referential, the background is a dim, flat depiction of the order I'd coaxed from my own brokenness, while the foreground is a dizzying array of bright, new, exuberant life. This is representative of the year 2021, for me. The joy, the fear, the disorienting beauty, the first conceptualization of a new self. Despite the aesthetic difference, both the background and the foreground are made of the same "castoff" paint.

This feeling I can't put my finger on is one I breathlessly live in, a snapshot of a diary entry in the life of the artist, at this time of minting: October 11, 2021.