Look at this mess. How many different ways are there to fuck up an art piece? You might be surprised.
I had this idea for Spirk in a Cave: What if the Cueva de las Manos, but with Vulcan hands? But I had never tried anything like this before.
I started with watercolors. I flicked, I poured, I sponged. I brushed, I used a spray bottle. I used my physical hand as a stencil. I realized I couldn't ozh'esta AND paint on my own, and so I got my own t'hy'la involved (as always, they have been most patient with my kinds of madness). I made stencils from the handprints on the botched versions.
I decided to switch to dry media. I bought a whole bottle of burnt sienna powder... and used up the whole thing. When the project got messy, I moved out on the front lawn and got some weird looks from the neighbors. I tried blowing the powder through a straw (which is closer to the way the originals are believed to have been done). I tried three different sizes of straws... and they all failed spectacularly. A friend made a joke that the burnt sienna looked like spilled cinnamon (thanks LQ), so I "yes and"-ed all the way into the kitchen, where I grabbed the actual cinnamon (and the powdered sugar and flour sifter, too, why the hell not). I experimented with adhesives and lost some body hair in the process (ouch). I tried brushing the dry powders with a dry paintbrush. I cursed when the wind picked up and blew away half my work. I used up the entire bottle of ground cinnamon.
In the end, the finished piece itself lasted only a few minutes. With a newfound appreciation and awe for the cave artists who created the originals that have endured for millennia, I created my piece, photographed it, and then had no choice but to fold the paper in half and dispose of all the powder. It was a profoundly humbling experience, in which I faced both my inadequacies as an artist and the concept of impermanence.
This happened in five different art sessions over a span of three weeks, and I honestly wasn't sure until the night before my posting date if it was going to work out. Thankfully it did.
But, just look. Look at this mess. Look at this chaos, this divine entropy. I want to tell you about my artistic panic, about all five phases of grief, about the way my fellow humans talked me through the hard parts and cheered me on (thank you, @lichqueenlibrarian and @a-most-beloved-fool). I want to tell you how this one delivery guy happened to pass by on two of my front-yard occasions, several days apart, and literally stopped to ask me, "You're still out here?" I want to tell you about my ruined clothes, about scrubbing the streaks of pigment off my skin, about the way my garage still smells like cinnamon.
I am a perfectionist. I am self-conscious about my shortcomings as an artist. I previously had no plans to share these botched versions of my art. But I'm sharing now anyway, because I am proud that, of all the myriad ways I managed to fuck up this process, at least I was never even once tempted to let a soulless machine do the hard part of my art for me. After thousands of years of humans making hand art like this, I was never even once tempted to let a machine counterfeit the entirety of this beautifully human experience in my place. Fuck AI.
(Thank you to @onedamnminuteadmiral, whose post was the catalyst that got me to share these failures.)
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