Fear not the blank canvas
I dreamt that I could paint with light. After all, that’s the medium of all paintings, right?
I can’t sketch well, so here’s an artistic rendering from my first use of Midjourney. It was quite painstaking to get what I wanted and made me question whether I could have learned to sketch well in that amount of time. I like how this rendering was faithful to my fuzzy orange Immersion Research hoodie while adding a nice twist of turning it into a robe. Perhaps I’ll commission such a garment!
Sometimes the tail wags the dog. After experiencing the artwork for the first time, my lover whispered to me that night a reflection on the piece: “who dares a blank canvas?” And, with a crash, I discovered in retrospect why I had even started this art in the first place. Words of Van Gogh:
“I tell you, if one wants to be active, one mustn’t be afraid to do something wrong sometimes, not afraid to lapse into some mistakes. To be good — many people think that they’ll achieve it by doing no harm — and that’s a lie, and you said yourself in the past that it was a lie. That leads to stagnation, to mediocrity… Just slap something on it when you see a blank canvas staring at you with a sort of imbecility.
You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter, “You can’t do anything.” The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves. Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of “You can’t.”
Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas. But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something…”
It doesn’t look like much, but the first prototype made of cardboard fulfilled the Goghian call to action: “just slap something on it”
And indeed, just that much was enough to bring the magic to life. Here’s a still from a video of my first test.
