Update On Nerd-Bashing

This painting started gestating at the early end of Melbourne’s 9-month long winter of 2025, and I referred to it in an earlier blog post somewhere down there.

After a deep dive into some detail I left it on the drying rack and forgot about it. Now I’m taking a look at it in the height of summer and reason that 'I’m probably not gonna do much more with it.

The head of the jock reminds me of max-headroom. That wasn’t intentional, but that famous CGI-puppet head must’ve crept into my mind at some point, most likely while watching nostalgia mixes on rumble.

The painted-on frame WAS intentional. I’m fighting against two things: super-thin minimalist frames and the obligation towards pure synthetic symmetry.

Personally, I find measuring rulers to be overrated. And as I’ve gotten older I’ve started stepping away from the urge to have a smooth surface or even edges. Let the conservators stress on that. Near enough IS good enough. Believe me, if the whole work is good, they’ll do what they can to preserve it, despite its defects.

AI Imagery:

As we launch into 2026 A.D, we can take a look back at 2 or 3 years now of AI’s influence on Art.

Often when a whizbang technological revolution comes along, I find both the doomsayers and utopians to be wide of the mark. The truth is somewhere in the middle. It was this way with 3D printing, with smartphones, with the internet, with computers, with photography.

My good friend and yours, F.T Marinetti, and his posse the Italian Futurists, stated nothing less in their Manifesto of 1909:

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And so it can be seen likewise with Ai art. Those of us who are physical artists, and serious about it, have been liberated of another constraint: The need to be flat and smooth. The need to have edges crisp and clean. The need for strokes and the artists hand to be concealed. The need for a perfectly straight line.

The detractors call it A.I Slop.

A fair statement.

Remember: 90% of everything is crap.

People don’t want more of what they are saturated with. They want something that’s rare and different.

Think of a fast-food chain or corporate outlet from back when it was new. How excited you were the first time you tried Nandos for instance. Or Subway, god forbid. Some of us were there, and remember that time.

I remember scoffing Subways sandwiches with ravenous enthusiasm in the early 2000s. This is before we knew Subway Jared was a paedo of course.

I remember when pizzas were rare and amazing, or Vietnamese phos and Banh-mi rolls. Then they just became omnipresent and available everywhere. And you restricted your attention to the best of them, not the slop.

Our good friends the Futurists.

Late 80s pop-cultural sensation Max Headroom

This polymer-clay sculpture i began and abandoned over the year also somehow seeped its imprint into the final painting. What informed what exactly, I no longer know. But I do know that I’m a painter and not a sculptor.