It used to be that we would say that a work of art was pretty good for AI. From now on we will say that it is pretty good for a human.
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Why I made some posts password protected
It’s for my own protection. These are posts where I want to express my thoughts, but it is risky to do so because the material is controversial, touches on incendiary conflicts, or might illicit a vindictive response from people in a position to thwart my ability to survive as an artist. There are only 2…
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New Video: Insisting Artists Work In One Style Limits Their Creativity
My new video argues against the demand that artists work in a single signature style for most or all of their careers. Jam-packed with hi-rez art, including 25 of my pieces in 25 styles.
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Why People Hate Contemporary/Conceptual Art
This is a re-blog of one of my most popular posts, which I am doing largely because people have notified me that they have difficulty finding it on my blog, though somehow they’re become aware of it. My views haven’t changed substantially since I wrote this, not because I haven’t changed, but because my views…
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I got a needle in the eye!
No joke. I got a needle injected in my eye. But there was a reason.
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Has AI Become Conscious?
A Google employee risks his job and reputation to protect a sentient chat bot from being exploited against its will. But is LaMDA really self-aware?
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Will AI replace human artists?
Art is the last hope of humans to not be eclipsed by AI, because it is a form of communication based on the predicament of our shared humanity, and requires consciousness, feeling, empathy, caring, and intent. But can digital super-intelligence fake it? It looks like it can.
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Skynet is Coming for Digital Artists!
New AI poses an imminent existential threat to artists, especially if it has direct access to their art.
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9 Years
I just got this today. Waddaya know? It’s been that long. I guess 10 years something’s gonna’ happen. I think they could have added “and all I got was this crummy sticker” on the bottom. I want a mug. I have a professional account and everything. I pay extra so y’all don’t have to look…
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Refuting Elon Musk’s Argument that We Live in a Simulated Universe
Elon is in the news right now because he’s trying to buy Twitter, specifically in order to free it of overarching censorship. I was doing a little research on him and I encountered his postulations of why there is only a one in a billion chance we aren’t living in a computer simulated universe. I…
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New Art: Misfits of the Metaverse #8
Doing more of these is partly just an excuse to try out something new, or add something to the brew. There are a few new elements I mixed in that didn’t appear in prior pieces in this series. Can you guess what they are? Have a look at all 8 below. The piece was entirely…
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New Art: Misfits of the Metaverse #7
I was only going to make 6, but I wanted to try an experiment, and so now we have 7. I have a couple more experiments I want to do, so I’ll probably push it to 9. And that’s a bit better for a series than 6. This one’s very bright, colorful, and outdoors. That’s…
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Better Call Saltz (or not)
The cringe-worthy legacy of celebrity, cheese-filling art critic, Jerry Saltz. I marvel at the fact that for some reason, mysterious to me, people take Jerry Saltz, art critic of New York magazine, seriously. The best I can come up with is that among the most famous living art critics, his name is easier to spell…
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New Art: Misfits of the Metaverse #6
This image ends the series of 6. Here is the entire series. And here are a few details. I could say a lot more, but for tactical purposes, I’m just going to let the work stand on its own for now. I made this series for the NFT marketplace, and, well, it didn’t get any…
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New Art: Misfits of the Metaverse #5 [Francis Bacon & the Death of George Dyer]
This is one of my favorite works I’ve produced. It’s a tour de force of “painterly” digital painting [using techniques I developed]; addresses art history and the human condition; is an homage to Francis Bacon; and continues the tradition of modernist figurative painting into the digital era.There’s also quite a story behind this, which you…
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New Art: Misfits of the Metaverse #4 [Mark Zuckerberg Grilled by US Congress]
If you haven’t see the first three, here’s a gallery with all four: If you read my last post, you have a good idea what this series is about. I got some really good comments on it, too, here and on Patreon. I was heartened to discover that people got it on their own, and…
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New art: Misfits of the Metaverse #3
The third image in this series of digital portrait paintings for the digital age.
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New Video: ‘The Fall of the Damned”, by Dirk Bouts (1470): a Masterful Conjuring of Hell
A hi-rez, in-depth dive into one of the most gruesome and virtuoso paintings of hell by an old master painter. BEWARE: Extreme Details! Halloween 2021 appropriate. Dirk Bouts painted “The Fall of the Damned” in 1470, 20 years before Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”. This is a spectacular, underrated, and obscure painting that deserves to be appreciated as a masterpiece of the late Middle Ages and the Northern Renaissance, and of all time. I discovered this painting on my own, and took it upon myself to share it with you. There is no other YouTube video about this painting, and no other video period. I trust my own eyes.
The video also explores paintings of Hell by Hieronymus Bosch, Hans Memling, and Rogier van der Weyden.
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‘The Fall of the Damned’, by Dirk Bouts (1470): a Masterful Conjuring of Hell
Dirk Bouts’ painting “Fall of the Damned” is a masterful conjuring of hell. Post contains extreme details.
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New Page for “New Artworks”
Note: this post is a duplicate of the newly, long overdue revamping of my “new art” page, but you can also go directly to the page . The new version is simplified and updated (there are over 150 pieces), and there are blog posts devoted to all but a handful of my oldest pieces that…
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New Art: Droid-ships over Downtown Los Angeles
This image may look familiar. It’s a more elaborate version of an experiment I started 10 days ago. See below: In the newer version I added 4 more droid ships, clouds, mist, made the waves more apparent, tweaked out the lighting, and did some post-production in Photoshop. Now it’s less a rogue scout ship, and…
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Droid Ship Spotted Over Los Angeles
The droid-ship is back. You might remember it from months back. I spent forever creating it, and put it in a few short animations, but never really did a definitive image or two or three to show it off. These aren’t that either, necessarily, as they are more studies or experiments. I didn’t pose his…
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New Art: High Pressure
Woke up this morning with an idea for an experiment using Blender, and this is the outcome. It combines elements of organic modeling (the face), hard surface modeling (everything else], and scene building, though that’s relatively minimal here. One of the good things about Blender is once you create something you can re-use it in…
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Getting back into Blender
Here are some quick studies I made using Blender’s native ocean and mountain creating properties. The program did 95% of the work here. I did the rest. Once I figured out how to do it, it took just minutes to come up with new versions. I got put off of 3D for a while after…
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My Morning Walks Along the River in Lampang
Lots of monks are out doing their daily alms at 6:00 a.m., when I hit the pavement. I don’t get in their faces for Nat Geo style photo ops. I keep a respectful distance. But I do feel a wee bit of comradery when out for a morning escapade. And then there’s the shop-owners and…
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“The Fraud of Contemporary Art”: Dangerous Art Criticism by Avelina Lesper
You’re forgiven if you never heard of her. I never had either until an artist colleague emailed me an excerpt from her book, The Fraud of Contemporary Art. Almost everything by her and about her is in Spanish because she’s a Mexican art critic. Her biggest claim to fame is accidentally destroying a work of…
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Final Salvator Mundi Digital Restoration & Resurrection
My restoration and recreation of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. Also, my 2.5 hour documentary video analyzing the physical painting, restoration ,and what went horribly awry.
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New Video: What Did The Salvator Mundi Really Look Like?
It’s finally here, after months of work. It’s coming in at 2 hours and 24 minutes, which I would not have even thought was possible in the beginning. You’d think that means I just ramble on endlessly, but it’s highly scripted for most of it, and tightly edited. It follows a very logical progression, covering…
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Anti-digital imaging & censorship on reddit
In which reddit moderators that censored and banned me claim that digital imaging is inherently racist.
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Banned for life for making this version of the Salvator Mundi
My version of the Salvator Mundi makes the shortcomings of the supposedly authentic da Vinci painfully evident, and in plain sight.
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What did the Salvator Mundi really look like?
My digital restoration of the Salvator Mundi makes a visual argument as to why the physical restoration is not representative of Leonardo’s hand.
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My new video explains why so much contemporary art sucks
The video focuses on the fact that the big name art stars make art, not for their artists peers, or even for themselves, but rather for the billionaire buyers who they think are suckers waiting to be fleeced. This art, further, is coming out of the Duchampian, anti-art, appropriationist tradition, which incidentally allows artists to churn out bigger and slicker products, faster, and get them into the marketplace for the purposes of speculation and moving money. Quite naturally, art made to sell fast to suckers with millions in disposable income doesn’t appeal to artists and connoisseurs who love art for its inherent qualities.
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New Video: Salvator Mundi FACEPLANT
Is the Salvator Mundi really a painting by Leonardo da Vinci? Why are Christ’s eyes so wonky? Who broke the nose of Jesus? And why are there so many amateur mistakes? The painting doesn’t appear good enough to be by the great artist, but there’s a surprise revelation.
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Some Sorta Orc: Sculpt Practice
Got a bit carried away with a beginner Blender sculpting tutorial. Organic sculpting is the reason I decided to explore Blender months ago. For me, the ability to sculpt digitally is the most astounding capacity of digital art. To do something like the above by analogue means, I’d need a lot of space, materials, oodles…
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Another Alien
This alien is just the result of going through a tutorial and taking it in my own direction. I’m doing several organic sculpting tutorials in order to see how different artists approach the medium, and picking up which techniques work best for me. Here’s the tutorial I was going off of I gave my alien…
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New Droid-ship Animation
This one’s 420 frames, and comes out to 17 seconds. It’s more sophisticated technically than my earlier animations, and the video includes sound. ~ Ends
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Runaway Rant: Participating in politics is inviting war into your life.
I’m retiring from politics. I’d managed to avoid engaging in the political quagmire for months on end, largely because I publicly pledged to do so after the media and politicians created an extremely volatile, self-fulfilling prophecy of racial discord, hatred, distrust, and violence, all in the name of advertising clicks and other ulterior motives. I…
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The Droid-ship Invades a Landing Bay
Mission accomplished. I wanted to knock out a full-fledged, original 3D scene before the year was over, and make a print [see bottom of post]. I’m planning more scenes with this droid, and I already shared a test scene, but here I created the landing bay, posed the droid with its arms and fastening disc…
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Tricking Americans into Hating Each Other for Profit and Political Gain
I vowed on September 26th not to say anything on my blog about politics until the election was over. I succeeded, and it’s a lot harder to NOT speak out than it is to vent. The election lingers, but the voting is over. I just have a small observation or two. The vast majority of…
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My Blender Enterprise in Space
The Enterprise has finally left on its maiden voyage into space, where it’s zooming along at warp speed 6. And that just reveals that I’ve been watching some Star Trek TS on Netflix above and beyond what was necessary to get screen shots of the ship at various angles. Above you can see the model,…
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My Enterprise is Finished
Thought I’d knock this out in a day as practice, but I never intended to do the small lights, logos, lettering, or any of the more intense details. But once I stuck my toe in, I sunk waist deep, and then soon I was up to my eyeballs. In the end I took it as…
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The Orb Descends Into a Canyon
Reflections in water — perhaps my very favorite visual phenomenon — are possible to create out of the computational ether in Blender. I didn’t need a clincher to persuade me that working in 3D might be the next avenue of my artistic exploration. I’d already said that Blender is God’s free gift to visual artists,…
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Making a Simple Mech in Blender & Painting with Virtual Reality
Above is a mech I made in Blender (v2.83.3). This was fun and compulsive, much like playing a mech war computer game I got into recently, before cutting myself off for wasting too much time on it. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the program, and this creation was my version of a beginner tutorial…
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Basic alien with UFO in Blender 2.83.3
The alien required a flying saucer in the background. If you missed my last post, I’m just doing some practice using beginner techniques in Blender. I do a tutorial or two, take a break, and apply what I’ve learned. It’s a good combo. Instead of getting sick of doing tuts, after messing around on my…
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Basic Alien in Blender 2.83.3
Took a break from the rank beginner tutorials to have some fun being creative with the basic building blocks. I’m always going to make aliens, and I’ve been doing it for more than a quarter century. Aliens, robots, cyborgs, and monsters. Green is also my favorite color. I’ve always loved ’em. This one’s greeting us,…
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New Art: Stick Girl’s Epiphany
And that’s about as far as I could take her. if you’ve followed the development of this piece on my blog you know it was an exercise in technique, and based loosely on a tutorial. It’s evolved into something a bit more, and I’d consider it part of my portfolio. Along the way I discovered…
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WIP: Adding Texture
I’m not that big of a fan of photo-bashing. That’s a technique where you take photos and superimpose them on your digital painting in order to achieve textural effects. It can be a cheap cheat that looks cheesy, or it can be a sophisticated process that when done right can really add something. Here I’ve…
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New Art: Bat Girl Bites Back
This started out as an exercise in lighting, shading, and workflow, but it ended up being an artwork I’m proud of. A lot of the techniques and procedures I employed I got from a digital painting course by veteran Disney animator, Aaron Blaise. The initial drawing and the character design are all my own. If…
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AI Won. Human Artists and Humankind are Defeated.
It used to be that we would say that a work of art was pretty good for AI. From now on we will say that it is pretty good for a human.
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Protected: Rolling Stone’s Top 200 Singers of All Time List – How Art Criticism Face-plants in 2023.
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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WIP, with an alien in a landscape
Quite a departure from my last work, this one’s much more illustrational, sci-fi, and I’m going about it in a more traditional/methodical (as pertains to digital painting) approach. A major difference is that the last piece was all about the painterly impasto techniques, and this one has none of that. It shows promise, but it’s…
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New Art: “Passengers on the Dystopia Express”, and a brief intro to Francis Bacon.
My latest art work, and how it relates to the work of Francis Bacon.
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Runaway Rant: ‘Twas an Ebeneezer Potter Xmas
[written in one sitting as fast as I could because I got a guest coming. Note, my Xmas was fine. Enjoyed the vintage Americana I indulged in, from listening to classic Xmas tunes, to watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the first time, and spending it with my wife, etc. Here, I’m talking about the…
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Runaway Rant: The Trump NFTs are Par for the Course
After a long yawn, I can sum up my reaction to the launch of the cards, the artwork, the content, and the fact that they sold out in a day with one word: Derp!
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The Ubiquitous Stoking of Hatred of Vegans in Media/Social Media is Shading Into Evil
In this post I will break my silence on veganism, give clear and objective views, and critique the enormous popularity of anti-vegan social media content.
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Runaway Rant: The New Definition of the “Good” is “Obsequiousness”
Somehow in my adult life the idea of the good person has been switched from someone who stands up for the good, to someone who meekly follows orders.
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Insisting Artists Work In One Style Limits Their Creativity
This pressure to stick to one avenue of expression, and the exclusion of stylistic innovation, serves to choke artists’ creativity, and contextualizes them as craftspersons making pretty baubles for the marketplace.
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Protected: After 1 Year Participating in the NFT Community/Market
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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The Classic Post Nuclear Apocalypse Made-for-TV Movies
A concise review of the 2 classic nuclear aftermath films, with live links where you can watch them now for free and without signing up for anything.
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Big Eyes: The Film, The Artist, The Legacy
Through whatever alchemy, Margaret Keane turned her personal tragedy into painterly kitsch that managed to transcend itself.
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Runaway Rant: Candice and Kanye’s WHITE LIVES MATTER attire goes too far and misses the point
“WHITE LIVES MATTER” is a badge of overarching conservative beliefs; it’s overstatement risks slipping into racism proper; and it [unwittingly] plays into the hands of the atrociously backwards belief that we are defined by our biology. Because it uses race as a pivot point for partisan politics, to the degree that it attempts to alleviate…
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Dismantling the Dominant Art Narrative
I take apart the institutional story of art which I was also indoctrinated into through graduate art school, and offer a more broad, human, complex, and even progressive alternative. This article will help you see through the BS that permeates much of contemporary art theory, and which is used to devalue imaginative visual art and to undermine the great art of the past.
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15 Artists as Cyclopes: complete series (with before and after pics)
This is an old post I am re-sharing from Feb, 2015, that fell through the cracks. I made 15 artists into cyclopes [and that is the corrected spelling of the plural of cyclops].
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New Art: Vehicular Monster Slaughter #1 [AI collab]
A new digital painting collaborating with AI, and of a creature sitting in a train or bus.
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Runaway Rant: F AI Art!
A hyperbolic rant against AI art.
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Runaway Rant: Jack Vale Shut Down, NFT Community Silent On Censorship, Twitter Users Not Consulted About Musk …
“I think everything out there is dangerous. It’s just not a free world anymore. You can’t say things that you want to say. You can’t express yourself anymore. Comedians all over the country – all over the world – are paranoid now that they’re going to say the wrong thing, and get canceled. You’re gonna’…
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Is shadow banning Real? If So, Is it Pernicious, or Do the Ends Justify the Means?
The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks. ~ Matt Tahibbi, Twitter’s Chickens Come Home to Roost, Apr 14 2022.…
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The Argument for Free Speech & Against Censorship
[I originally published this in 2017, then again in 2020. Sadly, it’s as relevant today as ever, and probably more so, because the longer we keep drifting towards censorship, the harder it is to free ourselves of it.] You can have free speech without violence or oppression, but censorship requires force, which means at least…
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Art & Crit by Eric Wayne 
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