Synth-West
Select work from the series
The intersection of technology and art is a fascinating subject for many reasons. Technology has always had a profound impact on how artists approach their craft. Each new development changes how artists think about art’s purpose and inspires insight into how it might evolve. Collectively, artists have always been eager to adopt new technology and are often among the first to explore its potential. Indeed, the relationship between technology and art has progressed in lockstep since the time humans began creating, crafting, and expressing themselves. This synergy is one of the oldest artistic traditions, a heritage many thousands of years old. In that spirit, I’m pleased to embrace new technology in my work and join generations of creative explorers who came before me.
But an embrace of new technology does not come without risks or detractors. This is especially true in the regional West.
Regional art of the American West, as a tradition, is rooted in a stringent attachment to painting—typically, oil painting—in styles ranging from quaint representation to dated idealism. Artists in the regional West are frequently held to standards established by a small, insular market that is resistant to change, which accounts for the lack of diversity and dearth of artistic exploration mentioned above. As a result, those who resist these limitations often must go elsewhere to find a receptive audience, which, in turn, contributes to one of the West’s most persistent problems: brain-drain. Ironically, this impulse to reject nonconformists not only bleeds western states of skilled professionals but goes against the independent, pioneering spirit that is the foundation of the western mystique traditionalists so desperately cling to. It’s time to change that.
“Synth-West” is a fine art series that takes my work beyond the realm of the traditional and into the future. The series combines photography, digital composition, illustration, and AI-generated visual textures to create unique digital artworks. It is a series that explores the American West’s mystique while proudly pushing past the traditional expectations of what western art can be.
The most noteworthy part of my process for this series revolves around using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist in creating unique visual textures and digital brushes. Using a Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (VQGAN) alongside Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP), I produced imagery using prompts such as “watercolors” and “Mark Rothko.” These images were desaturated, edited for contrast, and finally converted into digital brushes, which were used to add layers of texture to the series. Thus, I allowed AI to supplement my ability to create artwork like previous generations of artists allowed newly developed pigments or brush styles to augment theirs. And in that way, “Synth-West” lives up to the true promise of fearless, independent exploration, and the pioneering spirit.
“Synth-West” will be available as an open edition giclée print on archival-quality, acid-free paper through my website store.
