Chris Simonite's Cubo-Weirdism Blog! A Blog about Chris Simonite's Art by Chris Simonite. Who the Hell else?

They say your musical tastes form when you are around the age of 14. When I was 14 I became a really big fan of a little band called The Beatles. I suppose if it had happened a year earlier, it might not have stuck. But I was 14, so it did. 

I'm not saying I listen to them much anymore. But I still love them. And as you may have seen on social media, I still like playing their songs on guitar. Of course, after I saw the Get Back documentary the Fab Four became a bit of an obsession again. So I naturally I did a painting of the Let it Be album cover. Fun fact, the working title of that album was Get Back, so that's what I called the painting. 

After I did that painting I ended up doing separate individual paintings of Paul, George and Ringo. I had already done a John, which sold to a private collector in New Brunswick. So I decided it was time to do another.

This time around, I decided to paint John based on his look during the Sargent Pepper period, hence the title: Pepper John. So I thought I'd take this blog post as an opportunity to introduce you to the painting. It is available along with all the ones above, except of course, the other one of John. 

^{Pepper John, 11" x 14", oil on canvas. Available.} 

For the rest of this post I'll talk a little bit more about my experiment with AI generated imagery as a starting point for new paintings. Last week I showed you the first one where I asked Midjourney to create "a portrait of a middle aged man in the style of John Singer Sargent". And then I showed you what I did with the image. Please go back and read that post if you missed it. 

One of the things I've talked about in this here blog here, and it's something that is glaringly obvious, is that the majority of subjects for my paintings are men. And I have now actually painted five of these. And guess what? Four of them are men. I feel like I should apologize, but I suppose I can make up for it easily enough by painting more women. But I may be done with these AI based paintings. Even though I like them quite a lot. I still feel weird about using AI for painting subjects. We shall see. 

Anyway, part of the reason I have only done one woman is probably because of John Singer Sargent himself. you see I really like when my paintings have dramatic lighting in them. And Sargent tended to paint his female subjects in very soft light. So it seems to me that AI has learned to do that from–wait for it–Sargent! 

If I decide to do more I can play with the prompts to get more dramatic lighting, and maybe I will do more women. Anyway, here is the first AI influenced painting of an imaginary woman! Painted by me, at least. And I do quite like this one. So stay tuned!

^{Untitled (Imaginary Sargent 2), 11" x 14", oil on canvas. Available.}