Mechmaster Mike

“In Nomine Patris” 24” X 33.35” High Quality Archival Print. Taking Pre-Orders Now. Link In Bio. Exploring The Trinity And The Gnostic Depiction Of The Christ Archetype.
I’ve been experimenting with a.i. as a tool lately.

I don’t believe the value of art has ever lived entirely in the tools used to make it.

A brush is a tool.
A camera is a tool.
A computer is a tool.
AI is a tool.

The question has always been: who is using it, and toward what end?

I’ve spent more than three decades working with my hands. I create oil paintings that can consume 1,000 hours of my life, and I cover entire bodies with tattoos. That kind of work requires patience, trust, endurance, failure, correction, and an intimacy with the craft that no shortcut can provide.

So I have no interest in using AI to escape the process. I use it to enter the process differently.

To explore an idea before committing hundreds of hours to it. To challenge a composition, collide concepts, and give temporary form to something that previously existed only in my imagination.

The generated image isn’t necessarily the destination. Sometimes it’s simply a conversation that happens before the work begins.

There’s a difference between producing an image and making art.

Art carries intention. It carries the history of the person making it their influences, failures, obsessions, discipline, and accumulated years of seeing.

Technology can accelerate possibility.

It cannot manufacture a lifetime.

Every generation of artists inherits new tools. What matters is whether those tools replace our curiosity or expand it.

I choose expansion.

I don’t want AI to make the journey unnecessary.

I want it to show me roads I haven’t walked yet.