John Dalton

Quick oils experiment

GM!! "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." - Thomas Merton

✨ Good Night ✨

A thin slice of the duomo, Como.

Seeing all of the graduation pics hasn't been as triggering as in years past. The only graduation where I decided to walk across a stage was for the PhD. It didn't matter as much that no family members were there. In other news, here's an abstract AI-generated portrait of me. :)

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with MidJourney and I’m truly enjoying it as an artistic outlet. As I’ve created more and more work, the question of course comes up, “should I mint this?”. But I’ve learned in my journey as a curator and gallerist, making art and selling art are two very different things. I think you need to be intentional and have a clear vision for both and also not mix up one for the other. So to answer the question “should I mint this?” I had to think about what it meant to sell my work. To do this, I decided to put myself in the shoes of what a new artist coming into this space would do. I reached out to the all the galleries I respected through their normal channels and asked questions. I even applied to an open submission for one of the galleries I respect. Basically, I’m trying to start from the bottom and earn my way up to see if I can build credibility and also to see if there is a market for my work. And there may not be, but you don’t know until you start to put stuff out there and putting stuff out there does not necessarily mean minting it, but just sharing and seeing if a conversation starts from it. To see if it moves people, to see if inspires collectors, then through that process my hope is that I’ll have a better insight on whether minting it is the right thing to do. As part of putting stuff out there, I want to share my application to the open submission I mentioned. Hopefully it will give you more understanding on what I’m trying to do with my art, the story behind it, the process of its creation. I do think story, process, and commitment of the artist is important to understand. I know it’s important to me as a collector, so given that self-reflection, I’m offering a bit of my story, process, and commitment for all of you to consider. And finally, I do think every path will be different for each artist. This just happens to be mine and not anything I’m recommending others to do also, but hopefully it helps to give people a unique perspective given my history as a collector and a curator/gallerist. Thanks for reading this far and below is my application! ——————— TITLE "Quantum Menagerie" VISION The vision behind this collection of artworks is to challenge the viewer's perception of reality by creating surreal contrasts in time and space. By using a "slow motion photography" aesthetic in AI pieces, my aim is to convey a unique feel that distinguishes my work from others in the same genre. The underlying message of the collection is to demonstrate that the world is not black and white, and that seemingly opposing elements can coexist in the same space and time. Through the use of subtle juxtapositions, I want to create a cognitive dissonance that encourages the viewer to question their preconceived notions of the world. PROCESS My process starts with choosing two concepts that seem diametrically opposed but in that difference, it helps to bring a new perspective to the human existence. Sometimes it is something anachronistic (like a photograph of a Roman emperor, i.e. cameras didn't exist back then) or putting a person/thing in a place where it doesn't belong (a cowboy in the ocean). These juxtapositions are sometimes apparent, but sometimes random and a discovery process as to why it resonates. I put these into Midjourney and do dozens to hundreds of iterations both in concept, re-rolls, and tweaks to the prompts. Once I find an image I like, then I do multiple variations of that image until I find a few that I like and are pretty closely but subtlety different from another. Finally I take those few images and use AI video interpolation with very long intervals to finally create my slow-motion AI post-photography pieces. (attached one of the two pieces I refer to in the application).