An unpublished interview...
Back in June of 2025, I gave an interview to someone associated with Culturate Magazine after having some of my artwork featured in their magazine for publication. For whatever reason, I’ve never seen that interview materialize on the site and the magazine’s website seems to have since gone largely defunct…but I feel like you guys at least deserve to see what kind of thoughts come spilling out of my head when given a good writing prompt.
So here it is, my questions and answers originally given for the Culturate Magazine blog:
To start off, I’m fascinated by how your work evokes emotion through distortion, texture, and contrast. Could you share what first drew you into this kind of visual language? Was there a moment or influence that led you down this path?
This is certainly a question that required a lot of thought to answer.
I suppose I could point to my GenX upbringing, being exposed to things like JAWS and ALIEN (the standard gateway drug to the work of H.R. Giger and the entire “biomechanics” aesthetic at large) way earlier in life than I probably should have been. A similar argument could have been made for the moment my older stepsister who had a habit of dragging home questionable books during our late teens
happened onto a copy H.R. Giger's NECRONOMICON.
I could probably also point to cultural influences of my father's Czech heritage, being an immigrant from Prague. My dad still had a lot of books that while I couldn't read the Czech language, were full of grim illustrations that underscored a rather dualistic relationship with death and darkness that is the lattice work of the essential Czech cultural identity.
I could point to coffee table books of M.C. Escher drawings that my parents left laying around, full of illustrations of morphing patterns and impossible architecture. I must've drawn that stupid cube a thousand times during my adolescence. Most kids drew the “cool S”. I was drawing that stupid impossible cube.
But really, I think what really charged my visual language happened much further along in my late 20's, when someone suggested that I should put some of my drawing forward for a call looking to purchase artwork to decorate the offices of some film studio. I don't remember most of the details, but I remember the rejection and the feedback that my “work lacked the kind of texture and depth” they were looking for. In hindsight, they were absolutely right. I was mad about it at the time, but they were right.
So, I suppose that, in a sense, I'm driven mostly by a combination of autism and spite.
Your work seems to rebel against perfection, leaning into chaos and mystery. While someone is still developing their own artistic identity, how does one stay grounded in their vision when external feedback or trends pull in other directions?
Definitely another question that required some rumination and more wine. Without getting too existential about it, imperfection is the core of identity. Its not our similarities that make us distinct from any other generic, standard-issue hominid, but our differences...our imperfections.
Perfection only makes us machines. That's still something that humans have over AI – a machine does not yet understand how to make bad art on purpose. That's why images generated from most AI models exist in that uncanny valley of being too clean, too perfect.
An individual artist's “style” is literally an expression of imperfections in an applied way. The best a machine can ever hope to do is mimic an “average” of those imperfections, which only ends up like thevisual equivalent of autotune.
I'm not going to launch into a debate on whether or not AI-generated images are “art” or not. My singular contention is that it has no transferable skill to any other artistic discipline. A digital artist on aWacom tablet in Photoshop still has a transferable skill that if they should so choose, they could pick up a pencil and paper and still create, only stumbling slightly for the learning curve between the two media.
I will only say that if access to an AI generator were removed from you, the extent to which you could still create is the extent to which any AI-generated images are “your art”.
The imperfections are what makes a style. Otherwise we would all be cameras. I find great joy in seeing the work of an artist I know out in the wild and recognizing it as theirs before I even see the signature. Their own applied imperfections make this their distinguishing feature.
What does success look like for you as an artist right now? Has that definition evolved over time?
I suppose I want what every artist wants: to outrun the Third Death for as long as possible.
For context, there is a belief in some cultures that a human goes through three deaths in their life cycle. The first one comes when they become aware of their own mortality. Sometimes referred to as the “death of innocence” or “the end of childhood”, it is demarcated by an awareness of the passage of time, and that your time is finite.
The “second death” is actually the death of your physical body. You actually die and all your problems suddenly get transferred to those that are still alive to assume responsibility. Apart from release from the bondage of mortal responsibilities, perhaps the most notable benefits of this death is a general, if not grudging, whitewashing of most of your behaviors while alive.
The final, or “third death”, comes when your name is spoken aloud for the last time before you are completely forgotten to history and time. Despite their best efforts, everything humans do is finite, and in time even names such as Mozart and Einstein will be lost to the passage of time. Most of us live out painfully average lives that will barely survive our physical bodies.
This is not to imply that such people are unnecessary or do not perform essential functions in the machinery of the world, but simply that they do not perform a unique enough function to outlast their own flesh. And it has nothing to do with the amount of money one is able to accrue, but rather the ripples one is able to make.
You can make all the money in the world and still maybe only survive the Second Death for as long as there is still a bench in a park named after you. Conversely, some with the least means have been able to reverberate through the collective human experience for centuries.
I think that would be the best metric of my success as an artist. Its not a matter of sales. Strictly speaking, I'm already a more successful artist than Van Gogh, but here in the real world I would be rightly laughed out of any room in which I dared to make such an absurd assertion.
The bad news is that I can only load the dice into the cup up to the point at which I'm actually dead...and beyond that I have very little control over what happens. I can at least amuse myself with imagining future portfolio appraisals of my errand creative meanderings for people who will probably make more money off my work than I ever did while I was still consuming oxygen. But that's a whole other rant...
If your work could whisper something to the viewer, what would it say?
I'm not entirely sure, but the subtitles would probably be something in a sans serif typeface. Something grotesquely utilitarian like Arial or Calibri, perhaps.
If your younger self — self-the one obsessing over sketching the impossible cube—could see the art you make today, what do you think he’d say?
I think he would be impatient and try to get there before he really understood any of the building blocks I had to grasp to get here. Despite the temptation, I often think its for the best that we have no idea who we will become. I actually think that knowledge would fundamentally sabotage the trajectory.
As someone whose work evokes such raw emotion and visceral complexity, how do you personally perceive AI-generated art?
AI-generated art is “art” in the sense that a McNugget is “food”. Both meet the bare minimum criteria for consumption, both are viewed more as a product than a process, and neither are actually made by the person presenting them.
Generative AI appeals to people who fetishize output over process. They only care about the end product. This in and of itself is bad enough; its an extension of the ascendant paradigm in our collective mindset that “all viewpoints are equally valid”. A random person's Youtube-algorithm driven opinion is just as “valid” and actual expertise, and it similarly acts as a shortcut to the “feeling” of being entitled to...whatever it is that they think artists actually get for being artists.
Acclaim?...Wealthy patrons?...Barely-veiled carnal propositions?
I'm not sure what they think artists get, but someone should get them a welcome kit that includes being routinely shit on, asked what their “real job” is, or being asked to undertake free projects for “exposure”. If they're mad that they're not being taken seriously now, they're not even remotely ready for life as an artist.
Do you see AI as a helpful tool for artists or a looming threat that risks overshadowing authentic human expression?
I would say this depends on the application. “Artists” are not a monolithic career path, but a blanket of divergent applied skillsets. Fine artists and “gallery” artists are not likely to be impacted in any meaningful way, because they cater to a clientele that are not likely to be moved by that which is easily produced by automation.
Fine artists are probably also safer in the regard that there is no way to automate the actual footwork of presenting and representing your work to the world. I feel like the kind of “artist” who feels that the seemingly vast and endless depths of tutorial videos, process photos, and people practically begging anyone who will listen to pick up a pencil and draw is somehow “gatekeeping” the world of art from them, probably doesn't have the kind of work ethic to put in the necessary footwork and administrative hours to make any kind of life at it. Once they figure out that making an image isn't an automatic backstage pass to a life of fame, fortune, and unbridled hedonism, I feel like most AI “artists” will be over it and on to the next thing.
Applied Arts, like graphic designers, illustrators, et al...artists that are part of the corporate machinery...those are the artists that are likely to bear the brunt of the impact of generative AI. Livelihoods where artists lend a vision to a product. These are the faceless foot soldiers whose names you'll probably never hear, but they're the reason your favorite product or television show or video game or GUI looks the way it does.
I don't think any of these are necessarily benefited by generative AI. On the contrary, when you really drill down to what problem generative AI is trying to “solve”, the answer is “wages”, and the primary beneficiaries of generative AI have no interest in being artists at all. Their primary interest is to not have to pay one.
Philosophers like Mark Twain have argued that “there is no such thing as a new idea” — that all art is borrowed, reshaped, repurposed. Since AI draws from massive datasets of human-made work, how do you believe the essence of human-created art still sets itself apart?
Flaws. The imperfections are what makes something “human”. Its what sets apart handmade artisanal pottery from mass-produced dinnerware. Even when something is a two-dimensional image, there is a tactile difference that we generally refer to as “style”.
There is certainly an argument to be made for the existence of influences, but I feel like there's a world of difference between being obsessed with one or two artists' bodies of work and letting that guide your creative direction versus asking a machine to go out and sample millions of artists' works in a matter of moments, blend them together in a slurry of averages, and extrude them into a cursed internet hot dog of “content” that you will send out into the world to be rewarded by The Algorithm™ with internet points.
One is work. The other is entitlement.
If an AI could replicate your artistic style flawlessly, what do you think it still wouldn’t be able to capture?
AI couldn't replicate my style flawlessly, and I'll tell you why...because I can't even do that. In any given piece, my direction changes so many times throughout the course of the creative process, that I almost never have an idea of the finished piece when I start putting down a few elements based on vague ideas that came to me in some half-awake state at 3 in the morning.
My work takes form in such a haphazard and ephemeral manner that I seriously doubt any algorithm could properly replicate it. It could mine certain elements from it, but it would never capture the overtures and real-time experimentation that went into it.
In a world hurtling toward automation, what do you believe will keep the role of the human artist essential?
In a world hurtling towards automation, I think the human artist will ultimate be fine. There is so much AI slop already on the internet that the snake has already begun eating its own tail...and that's not getting into artists that are actively poisoning their own work on the internet with applications meant to deteriorate the performance of most existing models.
AI models are already problematic enough in the programming world that programmers are having to be hired back to fix the horrible coding being done by AI. Companies are having to keep at least a few graphic designers on payroll just to fix the hallucinations as the existing AI models are consuming more and more of its own previously-generated hallucinations.
The only reason you're seeing AI being shoved into everything is because there's been so much investment dumped into it that the tech sector needs you to buy into it before shareholders start losing patience with the promised returns.
If anything, in a world increasingly flooded with detachment and artificiality, the essence of the human artist will be more essential than ever. Generative AI creates a lot of slop easily...and ultimately devalues itself in the process. It is McArt, complete with pink slime.
If you want to know what the value of the human artist will be, you need to understand why you would be more impressed to wake up to someone making a salmon benedict as opposed to waking up to someone who ran out to get McDonald's.
There is care in it. Its the same with art...whether the pieces is a pastoral landscape or a visceral nightmare, there is an apparent thought and care that comes through in the end result. A machine doesn't care, nor is it really even capable of caring about the end result, beyond just trying to satisfy a query.
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