Searching for Beauty with AI Art

Until recently, I always gravitated to absurd, chaotic art. That meant anything from the alien worlds of James Jean:

To the grotesque hellscapes of Takato Yamamoto:

It was true for writing and movies too. I always preferred psychological thrillers and psychedelic vignettes to romcoms and westerns. Most importantly, it wasn’t just the media I consumed, but everything I created too.

I would say, do, and create absurd, chaotic things to entertain myself and those around me. I’d follow a straight path for a few meters and then abruptly zig-zag off-piste into the trees.

But over the last few years, I had many new experiences that sensitized me to the darkness. More than that, they sensitized me to indications of the darkness. I started getting nauseated and frazzled by those same thrillers and Yamamoto paintings that I was stimulated by before, seeing metaphors of my own fears and experiences reflected painfully in them. I started preferring Adam Sandler movies and paintings of flowers, and lately watching silly game shows on YouTube and cheesy Ukulele as pastimes.

One day a few months back, I got home late at night. I looked up and something startled me in the dark. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and my muscles tensed until I turned on the lights. It was a painting I had made.

Why did I make such an alien thing, I wondered? It felt like a reflection of that alienness inside me that I wanted to excise so much. I wanted to feel safe and human and normal and my fear in the dark turned to frustration in the light. Why would I make this? Why did I make something strange instead of something beautiful? What was wrong with me?

I remembered. For a few months, my friend taught at a paint-and-sip, where people drink wine and learn to paint step-by-step. I’d come along and always add a twist to each step — turning beige into green, straight lines into curves — until my canvas revealed a bizarro interpretation of the original.

I stood there, first startled in the dark, now frustrated in the light. Why didn’t I just follow the rules and make something beautiful?

I realized it was because chaos is easy. I’m a mediocre painter. My wrist trembles. Had I just followed the instructions, I would’ve ended up with a mediocre approximation of what everyone else was painting. Then all I’d have is myself, bare and naked without any evidence of my goodness or worthiness to distract from my warts.

But it’s a lot easier to entertain by being absurd, by throwing in a sudden twist off the road here and there than by doing the correct thing very well. It is possible to stimulate and entertain with genuine beauty, to instantly transmit a feeling love, warmth, and familiarity through art. But it’s much harder.

To me, beauty is a narrow pathway in the universe of possible art. Finding an entry-point with one stroke is hard and staying on course is even harder. It's like trying to grow intensely sweet fruit - the conditions of water, light, and care all need deep understanding and practiced hands. Every millimeter I'd stray from those delicate conditions would make the fruit less vibrant, less sweet. So what I'd grow from following that path — without much more skill and training than I have — would be sweet but mild and unremarkable, like fruit grown in weak soil. On the other hand, I could create something both remarkable and stimulating by planting a wild garden, letting some fruits burst with that natural sweetness when I catch the right conditions, while others shock with sourness or fascinate with strange new flavors all the way in between.

That was my diagnosis. But I wanted to create and experience beauty. I didn’t want this strange, alien form of expression anymore. I wanted things that made me feel warm, loving, and familiar. More than that, I wanted to see myself reflected in them. I decided from then on I would follow as closely as I could along the path of beauty, however heavily my hands trembled, and however unremarkable the results might be. The next few classes, I followed her instructions as closely as I could:

I felt better having these aspirationally beautiful paintings out of and around me, and I saw better parts of myself reflected in them.

I started searching for more art that was beautiful and gave me the sense of warmth, safety, and peace I was looking for.

Along the way, I commissioned a painting I wanted to cue a feeling of “safety even in the face of looming catastrophe.” I loved the result:

I discovered two artists who captured it themselves:

I wanted to surround myself with these and tried to contact them (based in Korea and Singapore) to ask if they sold prints. The originals would cost tens of thousands of dollars. But there were no paintings I liked as much as these, besides the visions of warmth and love I could cultivate in my own mind.

I had a scene in mind — two friends on a dingy floating through a cozy labyrinth of marsh — and started sampling from the universe of images with Midjourney to see if I could manifest it outside of my head.

This was one of the very first images:

The journey to find the beauty I was looking for really did feel like a journey through a great marshland river with many turns, dead-ends, reversals, and fluctuations of sunshine along the way. Here were a few stops I photographed:

I kept going until the sun came up outside my window, my hands were sore, and my eyes were red. My two travelers ended up at a gleaming, sunkissed meadow with a mysterious man meditating among its flowers. For me, this was the most beautiful photo of the journey:

It took me around 12 hours across an obsessive-compulsive all-nighter with thousands of scenes photographed until I captured the feeling of beauty I was looking for.

I had another scene in mind of a man sitting by a woodland pond with his fluffy friend. It took about as long as the first and another all-nighter. I’ll spare the journey and just put the final photo (note there are vital details in the texture only visible at high resolution, i.e. look on a bigger screen or download and zoom in):

This process of discovery - of searching through thousands of variations until finding exactly the right image - isn't something I could simply commission from an artist, nor would I want to. The journey of exploration itself became essential to the art's meaning. Yet creating these scenes by hand would require years of training and countless hours I couldn't spare.

Generative AI became my bridge across this gap. It let me traverse the vast space between vision and creation with the limited time and skill I had, producing pieces that now surround me - artifacts of beauty that I see myself reflected in, that bring warmth to my space, and that friends have been able to enjoy.