New Art: Mecha-Marilyn (V2)

In the final version of Mecha-Marilyn, I elongated the canvas, added broken glass, her signature on masking tape, and in the upper left piled thick [digital] paint swatches on the surface of the image …

If I were to write about this piece in the manner I do about other artists’ work, I’d lavish praise, but when it comes to my own art, decorum and a kiss of humility restrict me to explicating what it is and calling attention to the finer details. This is as it should be. I’d even prefer if I didn’t need to write anything, but I have found through experience that the more I share, the more other people appreciate whichever piece I elucidate. Had anyone else done it, the use of raw umber, making-tape-yellow, platinum blonde, wet cardboard, caramel, and bright yellow colors alone, which are the complementary colors of her blue eyes (and her signature), would have been enough to hook me.

I spoke about the meaning in my last post about version 1, and while my meditations on consciousness might seem academic to some, no, they are as resonate as the digital paint, which is, as far as the monitor is concerned, as beautiful as physical paint strokes.

and

Can I just call your attention to the impasto brush strokes within the glowing orange and green spheres?

It’s curious how much this digital painting is a celebration of paint: dabbing paint, brushing it, pulling it, streaking it, smearing it.

If the image didn’t strike you immediately as horrific, which it is in an existential way, it would be because of the beauty of the execution. I definitely strove to create a surface texture that was seductive and painterly in the way of some of my favorite works by Monet, Van Gogh, or Francis Bacon..

If it were easy lots more people would be doing it, but as far as I’ve seen unless the technology does it on its own, very few have succeeded at making digital art painterly to a degree that rivals physical mediums. But let’s stray away from technique and finally address why Marilyn.

---

Why Marilyn?

No, it’s not just because she’s a celebrity, and on the face of it she’s about the last person people who know my art might expect me to do a “portrait” of. But we need to slow down here and sink beneath the surface. When she’s not America’s bombshell, pinup, starlet, seductress, she’s a tragic figure who died in her mid 30’s a tormented soul crushed by the circumstances surrounding her own fame, which was too much for her to bear.

I never had the slightest interest in Marilyn—I’m not one to evaluate celebrities, royalty, billionaires, or the offspring of presidents beyond ordinary mortals—until, while reading the literary magazine Granta, I came across a picture of the dead Marilyn. 

I couldn’t relate at all to movie stars and had precisely zero interest in them, but the dead Marilyn cut through all that, and without her extravagant coiffure and the caricature of her makeup her humanity was laid bare. Here was just an ordinary, finite, mortal girl who had perished in her prime. I took all this in while riding the New York subway to or from my permanent-temp job in Manhattan. Since then I can’t look at her in movies without considering the vulnerable individual inside, putting on the act, and wearing the elastic mask.

I chose her for this “painting” because, well, if you don’t know, we human artists are, whether we know it or not, on the battlefield fighting for the sanctity of consciousness itself against AI, which outperforms us in myriad ways in fractions of a second. We all resist and want to believe that while Deep Blue and Alpha Go destroyed Garry Kasparov and Lee Sedol, respectively, at chess and go, permanently vanquishing our species at all strategic games, our own pursuit is in a discipline where it can never beat us. Like Garry and Lee, I got in the ring with the non-conscious robot and gave it my best.

This is the result of my attempt to wrestle with the implacable giant. A year ago, when I started this piece, AI art bots were not supposed to create celebrity knock-offs because of a fear of deep fakes, or more likely, copyright infringement, that might get the business moguls behind the AI into legal trouble that could mean financial loss. In short, AI wasn’t allowed to depict celebrities. There must have been a legal loophole that mysteriously rendered all moral concerns irrelevant because, by now, AI specializes in celebrity portraits. I therefore chose to get in the ring with a celebrity because it was something AI wasn’t allowed to do, and Marilyn was my pick because of her startling dual nature.

When I say “getting in the ring” with AI I’m partially alluding to an episode of the Twilight Zone starring Lee Marvin as an ex-boxer who is now the coach of Battling Maxo, an antiquated robot boxer scheduled to fight the latest model. Marvin’s character, “Steel” decides that since the judges and audience are not familiar with their fighter to get in the ring himself and duel it out with the machine.

You can probably guess how “Steel” does against an opponent whose fists are made of steel and who can take a punch like no man. Human artists are now on the proverbial chopping block, as is human creativity, consciousness itself, and some of us are foolhardy enough to get in the ring with AI.

I wondered if I could make an image that would resonate more than AI because I am a human making it, even if AI is better than I am, technically speaking, at depicting human emotions. Is consciousness needed to make art? I intended this piece to be a grenade lobbed at AI, and I employed several techniques in unison to make it difficult for AI to replicate the work. Unlike many artists who assert automatic superiority over AI, I concede its technical superiority but hoped to infuse my image with the “human stain”, and, in so doing, make it subtly but insurmountably different. You can say this was an existential experiment.

Further, to really give myself an edge, my subject matter is consciousness itself—the essential element that separates us irrevocably from AI.

I discussed the meaning at length in my prior post about Mecha-Marilyn (v1), and I’d invite people to read that post first. I don’t want to be redundant with a handful of fans that will have read that already. What might strike people as mere verbiage about the abstract topic of consciousness is in reality a theme I’ve been exploring and imaging for a couple decades, along with death and transcendence.

Marilyn’s head is in the vice-grip of a machine. Unlike the millions of cyborg babes AI has churned out based on people’s prompts, my Marilyn is retro-sci-fi, and the technology resembles more a motor than today’s high tech. Because I’ve talked about the aspect of illumination in the prior post (for a clue, study the yellow light], here I will address the visual device of the cracked glass.

The fractured mirror establishes, along with the brush strokes and painterly textures, the flat surface of the image. This is a modernist painting device that goes back to Manet, and is referred to as “the flattening of the picture plane”. This is commonly understood as recognition that a painting isn’t a window into a fantasy world, but is a rectangle of canvas in which an artist has physically applied paint, established a composition, and is a record of his marks. This realization is what eventually led to Abstract Expressionism. I absolutely love the surface of paintings and am the kind of person that gets real close to paintings in the museum to practically taste the paint.

This is why there are areas in my piece that are almost pure celebrations of painterly strokes, marks, and textures. Note that butting impasto shapes against each other is a fairly unique look that I’ve developed and which would be very difficult with physical paint. It’s the kind of thing that nobody would think of, and one would only discover it for oneself after hundreds or thousands of hours of making digital impasto paintings. If anyone else has done it as well, I’m not aware of it.

In my case, I am not just interested in the surface of the work. Rather, I love ambiguity, and so the work is both painterly on the surface AND has illusionistic depth. You can either look at the surface or through it. In fact, the image is multi-dimensional. There is the shattered glass surface, there’s a flat wall just behind it visible only in the center of the cracks, there’s the illusionistic space behind that Mecha-Marilyn occupies, there’s the encrusted paint in the upper left and the masking tape, which are on top of the surface and illusionistically breaking into our physical plane, and then because it’s a mirror, we are looking back into our own space. Note that this puts you in the space of Marilyn gazing at her own reflection in the broken mirror.

I did NOT just superimpose a photo of a cracked mirror on top of version 1. I made every line of the cracks using the pen tool in PS, and only came up with a technique through several experiments, trial and error. I guarantee nobody else has used the same technique, in part because it has built-in flaws.

There is a lot of stylization, so that from a distance the image looks naturalistic enough, but up close it is geometrical and abstracted. 

There is no tutorial in the world that will instruct you to paint a nose like this.

If the mechanism of her mechanical shell fooled you for any length of time as remotely operational, up close you only see paint and shapes that have no apparent function.

and

I intended early on to include text because, for me, somehow the name “Mecha-Marilyn”—which I came up with on my own—was something I wanted to be integral to the image. Incidentally, at the time, I Googled “Mech Marilyn” and was disappointed to discover that I was not the first person to put those two words together. Someone had included the pair in a list of hypothetical stripper names, but that was the only listing. Today, there are several more. 

While thinking about what font to use, it occurred to me to use her own writing and piece together the word Mecha, which is precisely what I did. Like most artists, I have a lot—really a lot—of experience working with masking tape. Given the color, it was just a natural choice.

The swatch of paint in the upper left is one of my trademark techniques that I invented and nobody else uses or knows how to do. At least that I know of. It is the product of years of experimentation and using programs in ways they were not intended to be used.

I’ll end on the tear, which I didn’t address before. One of the main reasons I wanted to include it, at the risk of being cliched, is that I just wanted to reflect the yellow light in its wetness. It turned out that yellow didn’t work, and I needed to use more of a white. The tear is as stylized as everything else, and I decided to keep it with just a touch of yellow mixed in because it reminded me of those weeping Madonnas that occur throughout art history.

For the other art historical references, including H.R. Giger, see my previous post. Please also see that post for a deep dive into the meaning of the image.

I haven’t talked about the hair or the fact that the images within shards of glass are different sizes, but I have to leave some things for the audience to discover on their own. 

I will make prints available soon and will share them here.

I hope you enjoyed Mecha-Marilyn. Whether or not she can survive against the onslaught of AI remains to be seen.

~ Ends

---

And if you like my art or criticism, please consider chipping in so I can keep working until I drop. Through Patreon, you can give $1 (or more) per month to help keep me going (y’know, so I don’t have to put art on the back-burner while I slog away at a full-time job). See how it works here.

Or go directly to my account.

---

Or you can make a one time donation to help me keep on making art and blogging (and restore my faith in humanity simultaneously).