But even from the valley here, this ridge dominates the edge of the horizon and provides us with beautiful sunsets all through the year. I don’t have to walk very far from my house to see them. I still take many photos of the sunset. Sometimes I try to (digitally) “sculpt” them into images that are little more “evocative.” My digital art is an ongoing “adventure” of its own, a long experiment in media I will probably never master, but I might be able to place a small part on the ever-expanding canvases of “the New Art,” searching for genuine human insight, creativity, and technique by using digital tools on photographs. I suppose the much promoted and much feared elements of “AI” can be useful (I’m not sure I know how to distinguish them from tools I’ve used for many years — everything these days, it seems, claims to be AI).
Some of these tools I can recognize because they seem to “think they know better than me” about the effects they create. So I wrestle with trying to “correct them” to give me what I want in the picture. My experience is AI tools (like, for example, “magic erasor”) is that they create a whole bunch of new problems for an artist who tries to use them as tools for his own creativity rather than as “shortcuts” for turning ideas into “visuals” for some practical communicative process or just for “fun.” Of course, all these digital techniques keep changing, and becoming “more powerful — sometimes in strange and chaotic ways.
The sunset also changes, but it follows the same reliable path, year after year. In a few weeks, it will be the Autumn Equinox.
