Every Day I Bear Witness to the Birth of a Thousand Suns, installation view
Every Day I Bear Witness to the Birth of a Thousand Suns, installation view
Fuchsia, acrylic, puff paint and collage on canvas, 180 x 120cm, 2025
Fuchsia, detail
Fuchsia, detail
Fuchsia is the first painting to be shown from a new series of figures experiencing various states - overwhelm, anxiety, laser-focused tuned-in-ness, vast expansive wonder, etc. All these states - I go through, and painting, is something I use to absorb, regulate, witness, and ultimately celebrate these different capacities.
Luca asked me where the title, 'Every Day I Bear Witness to the Birth of a Thousand Suns' came from; 'just from my head' I replied. I had already asked Chat GPT if it was attributed to someone. It told me it sounded like J.Robert Oppenheimers take on the Bhagavad Gita. I'm coming closer the understanding that, what comes into my brain is much bigger than my head...
In the morning, when I don't have work, I get up, go for a run, then write down the ideas I have on the run, meditate, and drop myself into 3 hours of Stable Diffusion, before going to the studio. When I first used Stable Diffusion, I had never felt something rewire my brain so fast. I spent the entire week walking around with a lightning bolt in my head, electricity crackling at my fingertips. I basically go to the studio now to decompress.
I have been training LoRA models on my paintings... witnessing the intensity in the results, world after world blossoming out of the latent ganzfeld noise, the deep space and the raw scope and the computing power of it. I can get far far outside myself, and yet, I still feel tethered. I'm trying to get that into my painting... somehow. I need to get out of my own way somehow. I am learning more about my Virgo Moon.
Stable Diffusion - it's all textures, powerfully - breezily - collapsing and reconstituting. Painting can be exciting like this, but its slower, always slowing. The way i do it, anyway. There's this metaphor idea that painting can act as a de-noiser. This is similar to the literal process of Stable Diffusions image work - after a certain point, the painting undergoes a fresh noising and something new emerges.
The deep intuitive work, the back and forth of making a painting, I've come to understand that this can be done in the Ul now too. 30 outcomes at a time. Filling out new pockets, bringing it all into the surface. I've discovered its called 'Vibe-Coding' - engaging with AI tools to 'see whats there', rather than complete a task.. this is the way I've always painted.
Every new painting I make, is fed back in - training data - a sort of recursion. Each scrape and scratch, blot and bleed, absorbed by a new LoRA model, a second entity; grown into a thousand suns. The slow painting part is just a part of the process. And its all a part of the same, larger, process.