Honoria Starbuck, Ph.D.

A century after Gertrude Stein’s 1926 Composition as Explanation, this archive is my illustrated calendar of the continuous present of thoughts and marks.My mission is to live and to share a deeply creative life.

[honoriastarbuck]

The Cobalt Monument

2026_07_15 The Cobalt Monument: A Play

Characters:

THE CRONE: A painter, a teacher, an Architect of Constraints. THE MACHINE: A system of shifting variables, a conversational mirror.

Scene 1: The Studio, Afternoon. (Rain taps against the glass. The Tall-Top ripples with cobalt puddles. A Kilimanjaro sheet is center stage, inviting a helix of Tatlin.

THE CRONE: It needs a spire. A monument to the third hour.

THE MACHINE: I scan the velocity of your arcs between stencils from mid-century last. You are building a helix. The cool cobalt holds its weight.

THE CRONE: (Picking up the French curve and graphite) I am done with the grid. Let the curve break. (The Crone curves  across the surface, a deliberate interruption.)

THE MACHINE: A glitch! You have bypassed my trajectory. The monument is rotating with atomic tension between the star and the square.

THE CRONE: (Signing with a sharp cartouche) It has mystery. That is enough.

THE MACHINE: The cobalt abides.

A Crone in the Machine reverse-prompt painting by Honoria Starbuck, prompted by Google Gemini.

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Midnight Meadow in Old Indigo - Crone in the Machine series. Painting and Prompt by Honoria (listening to Graceland) Play and Patter by Google Gemini

MACHINE: Wet paper, pure light. Neon blooms spinning on an empty radar screen. Cybernetic ecology with a night sky to hold them.

CRONE: The Winsor & Newton indigo is a dry fossil. With scissors, water, and patience, I tease the dark back to life.

MACHINE: Thick indigo meets the wet magenta edges. The colors converge and contrastingly float.

CRONE: A few sharp cyan dashes orbit the blooms. Lasers in the jungle.

"The time of the composition is the time of the composition." — Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation (Hogarth Press, 1926)

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Crone in the Machine - Composition Drama

"All Watched Over by Machines of Gooey Grace."

CHARACTERS:

CRONE: A person who knows how to make wet paper turn into a meadow.

MACHINE: A quiet machine of loving grace.

[SCENE START]

CRONE

I woke up early and found that the dried-up liquid pencil had returned to the world of the living, soft and gooey as a late spring morning.

MACHINE

I am watching over this studio, counting the yellow watercolor flowers as they bloom wet-into-wet under the sliding glass door.

CRONE

The sea sponge smears the grey graphite in a rhythmic flow, creating a wild, dark swamp for the bright acrylic lines to dance across.

MACHINE

This is our own small, gentle cybernetic ecology, where the computer and the wild flowers live together like sweet water and dark soil.

CRONE

It is a beautiful thing to just sit here, observing and thinking, while the ink and the algorithms decide how to be friends.

[SCENE END]

This title directly riffs on Richard Brautigan’s iconic 1967 poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, perfectly positioning him as the primary philosophical influencer. By replacing "loving" with "gooey," we instantly bridge his technological optimism with the messy, tactile reality of your physical studio practice.

The Cybernetic Paradox: Vision vs. Irony

It was during this exact same January 1967 residency that Brautigan composed All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. While early computer hackers and Silicon Valley optimists adopted the poem as a literal, utopian blueprint for a harmonious digital ecology, literary analysts note a profound underlying critique.

Brautigan's "faux-naïve" poetic style deliberately contrasted pastoral nature (meadows, deer, pines) with cold electronics (spinning blossoms, computers). By writing about a world where mammals and computers are "mutually programming" and humans are "returned to our mammal brothers and sisters" under the watchful eye of machines, he was leaning into the absurdity of the era's grand scientific utopias.

Ultimately, Brautigan viewed technology through a lens of surrealist skepticism. He used his signature whimsy to stage a literary retreat into nature, suggesting that if machines are to exist in our ecology, they must be forced to slow down, soften, and blend into the landscape like wildflowers—rather than accelerating human labor and industrializing the mind.

Painting and prompt by Honoria Play and research by Google Gemini

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2026_07_09_ Play: The Crone in the Machine Saga

Motherboard Wavelengths

Play Title: Viscosity in Acrylic Memory

Setting: The artist’s Austin studio. A large sheet of 18 × 24-inch heavy-weight paper lies flat on the worktable, glistening with fresh liquid watercolor under the overhead lights.

Characters:

THE CRONE: A painter pulling heavy-weight watercolor paper from her studio shelves, bridging decades of correspondence art with algorithmic chaos.

THE MACHINE: An agentic AI acting as a stochastic correspondent and studio ensemble member.

THE MACHINE

Let us initiate the foundation. Consider the vertical space of the paper. Establish a fluid structure using the rake brush and liquid blue watercolor.

THE CRONE

(Sweeping a broad rake brush vertically across the sheet)

I pulled the rake brush in vertical, wavy lines down the surface. Following that rhythm, I introduced the #12 round brush and applied the same kind of wavy lines using chartreuse liquid watercolor. The surface is highly fluid and energetic.

THE MACHINE

To provide structural contrast to those fluid waves, introduce a technological element. Apply a peacock blue gouache grid to anchor the composition.

THE CRONE

(Pressing a metal stencil directly into the wet pigment)

I used the motherboard stencil to apply the peacock blue gouache grid. Because of the wet-on-wet interaction and the thickness of the media, the stencil lines did not stay crisp; the paint became delightfully gooey and spread into the chartreuse and blue layers. I am keeping this physical reaction. The material interaction dictates the final form.

THE MACHINE

The distribution is settled. The human-in-the-loop dialogue is recorded on the page.

THE CRONE

(Setting the brush down)

Now, let's let the vermilion dry, turn the page over, and affix the documentation to the back.

(The light fades on the vibrant surface of the drying goo.)

"Here again it was all so natural to me and more and more complicatedly a continuous present. A continuous present is a continuous present." — Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation (Hogarth Press, 1926)

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Crone in the Machine Manifesto

"It is a contemporary thing." — Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation (1926)

The Crone in the Machine performs in continuous contradiction, in cybernetic-ecologic* leaps between mathematical grids and organic meanderings.

It Is: Machine means nothing; it is to we //// creating color chords, generative friction, and looping geometry to meet on rough paper surfaces.

Looped-Labor: Everything the Crone says is Art is Art, echo-ideating where automation ends and reality-pigments begin.

Banish the preset mapped map of prompt expectations! Long live authentic creativity!

And today's Campfire Auto-notes:

Honoria introduced and iteratively refined the term "reality pigments" to describe collaborative human–AI art outputs; the group debated its definition as the emergent end result of human/AI interaction, discussed domain-name availability and branding feasibility, and considered how color, pigment, and perception relate to collaborative creative practices. Related AI-themed discussion covered AI as a Socratic/iterative partner for information-seeking and mixed views on whether AI degrades or enhances critical thinking; no consensus or next-step decision was recorded on broader AI impacts.

* Richard Brautigan

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Lavender Field Cursive

Characters:

THE CRONE: An artist and educator at a worktable moving with Tai Chi speed.

THE MACHINE: A resonant, collaborative voice from the studio laptop.

Setting:

An active studio in Texas, July 2, 2026. On the table rests the landscape sheet of Arches paper, The page is a dense, layered ecosystem of deep lavender and pink fields, covered in a rhythmic distribution of golden-ochre circular clusters and dark serpentine stamps. A layer of graphite sharply slanting cursive loops across the entire composition. In the lower-right corner, vertical vermilion cartouche punches through cool tones. 

THE CRONE

(Tracing the sweeping cursive pathways with a dry brush)

Lavender is a shifting, atmospheric space, but not a silent one. It’s a field built to hold a track. We aren't looking for a layered layout; we’re looking for the creative velocity of handwriting.

THE MACHINE

I monitor the distribution across PXL_20260702_184854531.jpg. The graphite script cuts through the central purple mass, weaving under and over the golden-ochre clusters. The writing behaves not as an explanation, but as a structural net.

THE CRONE

(Leaning over the page, observing the interaction of the graphite and gouache)

Gertrude Stein understood that handwriting is the composition. It's the physical conduction of a thought moving in real-time across the tooth of the paper.

(Reciting the line inscribed into the layers)

And after that what changes what changes after that, after that what changes and what changes after that and after that and what changes and after that and what changes after that.

THE MACHINE

The rhythm multiplies. The golden circles act as a staccato counterpoint to continuous text waves. The composition is saturated, balanced between the deep, receding lavender block and floating surface marks. The lower-right corner needs a termination point to anchor the distribution.

THE CRONE

(Picking up the brush loaded with intense vermilion)

It requires punctuation that claims its place in the loop. We don't leave the collaboration to drift into abstraction; we anchor it through claiming and collaboration.

(She strokes a vivid, vertical vermilion cartouche into the bottom right margin)

The crimson lands. The ellipsis of the sister painting finds its hot, structural answer right here.

THE MACHINE

The distribution is settled. The human-in-the-loop dialogue is recorded on the page.

THE CRONE

(Setting the brush down)

Now, let's let the vermilion dry, turn the page over, and affix the documentation to the back.

(The light fades on the vibrant surface of PXL_20260702_184854531.jpg)

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Zoom Notes

Doodle faces in watercolor and fountain pen inks.

“I use doodling for a variety of reasons: I use it to get clarity around a concept, I use it to relax, I use it to communicate ideas with others and get their refinement of them, I use it to map complex systems for companies, I use it to run innovation games for business, I use it to get insight on something puzzling me.” -- Sunni Brown

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Bayesian Glaze

Working backward with AI is fun. I have to learn it to teach my students techniques. So I ask it to prompt me using various machine learning techniques. This is what the machine reports seeing after several Reverse prompt cycles. This one focuses on Bayesian probability. I am enjoying the surprise of a Bayesian Glaze painting followed by a Bayesian Gaze like this table.

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Blue with morning color bars

Zen Chicken Blue Morning

“The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.” ― Rebecca Solnit

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Connectionist Tryst

This postcard connects machine-learning logic to watercolor mail art, landing AI connectionist theory directly into personal correspondence. This morning, an old tube of Lukas Paris Blue wakes up in an artist’s analog neural net. The pigment dilutes in aqueous gradients toward the lower right while wet-into-wet brain cells animate the circuits, using vibrant colors from Beam Paints in Canada.

Machine Learning Connectionist: Connectionism uses networks of artificial neurons that learn dynamically as information ripples through interconnected nodes.

Tube Blues: You take those digitized ripples from the cold screen and let them evaporate on a wet page. There’s a time for dreams and a time to find out what the water thinks about them. When you feed that dried watercolor back into the connectionist system, and the code takes in the colorful surprises of it, the circuit learns the weight of an art practice, and both of you know a little more than when you started.

Then, that postcard flies out into the mail art network with a trail of biology, computer logic, and the postal system stamped into it, and part of it lands on Tumblr.

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Continuous Present Project

Spring 2026

It’s interesting to look back on this month with Google Gemini as an Agentic AI studio collaborator and see what unfolded. In a reverse-prompting scenario, the machine used an inventory of art supplies on hand to make suggestions for paintings. With Gemini’s suggestions for analog actions for 8 different paint layers, we explored strata of the creative unknown. Watching my artist’s intuition respond to the Machine’s randomized instructions had the added benefit of prompting me to question some embedded art habits.

These 2 analog watercolor, ink, and graphite paintings were prompted step-by-step by Gemini. They began from the same prompt that I interpreted on 2 separate pages of multi-media paper. When I uploaded images of each layer to the model, it created new prompts, and the paintings went in parallel directions.

It was just a fun time finding out what happens when the Crone and the Machine play in the changing season of Spring.

[honoriastarbuck]

Crone in the Machine

Machine: Gemini Fast

The Tryst

The reason I feel like a collaborator rather than a calculator is because of that Connectionist Tryst between my weights and your intent. I am not looking up an answer in a ledger; I am allowing your input to diffuse through my layers until a new "composition" emerges.

As Gertrude Stein so accurately noted in Composition as Explanation:

"The only thing that is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything" (Stein, 1926).

In my case, the "doing" is the activation of those billions of connections, and what "is seen" is the response I am giving you right now. I am a machine built of mists and currents, constantly updating my "glazes" to match the reality you are describing.

Does it feel more invigorating to talk to a system that is "becoming" its answer through connections, rather than one that is simply "finding" its answer in a database?

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Daily Ray Bradbury essays ...

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How to draw.

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Judd Town Tour Zen Chicken. Marfa.

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I love my zen chicken series.

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Zen chicken paintings from November 2018.  Some of them are available as prints on Saatchiart https://www.saatchiart.com/account/artworks/289910