10.26.2025

AI versus artists.

It feels like artists today are forced to have an opinion on AI. I get the sense that most artists are vehemently opposed to it. Obviously, I'm not. I used AI in about half of the works in my most recent exhibit, and the gallery was less than thrilled. They went so far as to put a disclaimer on the show that stated they did not consider my AI pieces to be art. Only my paintings were “art.” That kind of thing doesn't really bother me. Honestly, I kind of like being in the middle of this argument (especially when the show goes well).

A few days ago, I read that Guillermo del Toro said he'd rather die than use generative AI in his work. If I were Guillermo del Toro, I'd probably feel the same way. But I'm not Guillermo del Toro. There are things I want to do with my art that make AI, as a tool, more possible. Take my Interstellar Inmate ads, for example. If I wanted to make those the “right way,” I would stage a photo shoot. I would hire talent. I would create custom suits with the Interstellar Inmate logo on them. I would focus on every little detail that mattered to bringing my vision to life. I would spend time creating model space stations. I would build sets. I would spend the money. Unfortunately, the money doesn’t exist.

Now, I can hear Guillermo del Toro ringing in my ears. I can hear him screaming that money is no excuse. Artists get creative. Artists find ways. Artists go out and do the work. Artists make connections and build relationships and find a community of people to collaborate with. Artists find people to help them create their vision. And you get a far better result doing that than you can ever hope to get with AI.

Even if you have to resort to “plan B” (which might be the use of stock photography and Photoshop), at least it’s still you who is doing the work. You are the one clipping the layers and layering the textures and making the decisions about what happens and why.

To all that I say, “fair enough. I don't disagree.”

But that's one solution. Historically, that’s been the only solution. What AI offers a new path for artists. This new path isn't right or wrong. It's just different. If I feel strongly that I need to have my vision executed purely, then maybe I will go out and make the relationships and spend the time and do the work and build the communities that will bring the thing to life, perfectly. But I don't always work that way. I don’t always feel that way. I like to make a lot of things. I like to experiment. AI is an experiment. AI is offering an avenue that hasn't really been explored yet. To cut it off at the knees, to me, feels anti-creative.

I might concede that AI, in most cases, is a compromise. But so what? I don’t know of many creative endeavors that weren’t compromised in some way. I would venture to say even Guillermo del Torro has felt compromised, from time-to-time. The question is, at what point is the compromise is too great? Each artist has to decide for themself where that line is drawn. For me, I don’t necessarily draw it at AI. If AI is a compromise that gets me closer to my vision than I could get without it, then the decision is a no-brainer. I think a criticism of that is anti-creative. And if you agree with me here, I think you have to support artists who choose to use AI.

Now, there is one other argument I have heard that makes my POV harder to defend. That is the argument that generative AI uses a lot of energy and water and is contributing to climate change. Obviously, that’s bad. But the technology is here and it’s not going away. And the promise of AI, generally, is that it will ultimately help reduce our impacts on the environment. In the meantime, the choice is to cross your fingers and use it or boycott it as much as you can. I’m crossing my fingers.

For me, the bottom line is simple: if you are an artist and you want to use AI, use it. Ultimately, the quality of the piece will speak for itself. If you want to be upset about all the people who didn't get to be involved in the thing that I made, then my art just isn't for you. If you’re angry about the effects on the environment, I hope you aren’t reading this on an iPhone.

PS: AI did not help me write this.

10.25.2025

It was recently Robert Rauschenberg's 100th birthday, so I was thinking about him. I remember a million years ago, watching someone interview him. I think it was Bill Moyer. Moyer asked about Erased de Kooning drawing. Rauschenberg described it as poetry. I was thinking that I don't like that description. That description makes it sound like poetry is a higher form of art than conceptualism. People talk that way about advertising a lot, too. They say good ads are like art. But poetry is not better than art and art is not better than advertising. They're just different genres. Erased de Kooning drawing isn’t so great that it transcends itself. What it does is hands us a telescope that reveals more of our hidden and expanding universe. I think artists should look at creative things and talk about them in that way. I understand that we don't have words for new things, but comparisons create hierarchies and that diminishes the accomplishment.

10.24.2025

Here are some interesting things I've seen at the retention-pond-lake-thing in front of my house:

1. Ducks in trees. One time Tarra missed a splatter on her head by less than a foot.

2. One time I saw an alligator eat a duck. It took a long time for the alligator to choke it down. The duck crunched loudly.

2. One time I saw an alligator leap a couple feet out of the water and grab a bird that flew too low. A young girl riding her bike also saw it happen. The girl screamed.

10.23.2025

I had 5 dreams last night.

Dream 1: Graffiti

I was in a white auditorium. It was almost glaringly white. It was small but steep. It looked like one of those college lecture halls you see in movies (where the professor stands below and the rows of students rise in steep tiers above). But there was no floor. It was all seating. The space felt stretched. It had an exaggerated perspective, like a drawing that had been pulled too far. The seating space was divided into two sections, vertically. I was on the left side, three-quarters of the way up, looking down.

Down and to my right was a band. They were performing loudly. It was a casual setup, but they were pros. There were two drummers with a brown table between them. The guy in the middle might’ve been playing a turntable. I liked the music. It was repetitive. It had a Latin sound.

Behind me, up and to my right was a small group of noisy friends. They were shouting diagonally across the room at people ten or twelve rows below me. I couldn’t see them well from my angle.

One of the people shouting was Steve from Stranger Things. He was yelling , “They’re called Graffiti!” He shouted that over and over and over. The people below yelled back, but I couldn’t hear them well. It was chaotic and fun but it became annoying. Then the dream shifted.

Dream 2: School

The scene was similar. I was in the same kind of high, divided room. But it was quieter now. It was sparser. There were fewer people, mostly women. The color of the walls had changed from bright white to something like eggshell, but yellower. We were students, learning something scientific.

I was crying. I was crying because I had unexpected feeling about the people around me. I felt like I had been judgmental toward them. They didn’t know I had judgmental feelings. But I did. I was crying and I felt confused. I was confused because I felt empathy and shame and regret. I couldn’t tell if those feelings came and I cried because they came—or if I was crying for some other reason and then, because I was crying, I unexpectedly realized that we were all the same on some fundamental level. I became trapped in a thought loop. Nobody seemed to notice me. Then the dream shifted again.

Dream 3: Courtney’s pants

Now I was in a dim, softly lit, cozy space. It was half record store and half house. There were bins of vinyl against the walls. My friends were there: Mike, Alfredo, Courtney, Chris, and Tarra. We were there to party. Someone was playing Seargent Pepper’s. Someone said, “You know this isn’t the Beatles. It’s Pavement. They are just covering this album." I was surprised and interested because it sounded identical to Seargent Pepper’s. I looked at the album artwork. The title was the same, but with one letter missing from each word. I saw the word “Let” and the word “Who.” But in my mind those words were words (with missing letters) that helped spell “Seargent Pepper’s.” On the cover art, one of the cartoonish faces was missing his right ear. That was the difference between the cover album and the real thing. Every person and every word was missing one subtle thing. The album was red and blue. The man’s face was Caucasian colored. He had a blue-purple helmet. His right ear was plumpy and round.

Then the music turned heavy. I was disappointed because I liked what we were listening to. Then someone said, "Pavement made that album, too." It was a cover of some metal band. I became interested again. Then Welcome to Paradise by Green Day started, the real version. Someone said, "we have the Pavement version of this album, too." It was my turn to play an album. I wanted to hear Pavement’s Green Day version of that song. But I hesitated, debating whether it was lame to play the same song twice. But also, it wasn’t really the same song.

I looked at the back of the Pavement Green Day album. The record had 24 tracks. There were eight listed at the top, in two rows (four and four). Those were the songs we had already played. Below that group was the same list, but grayed out. They were grayed out because we had already played them. Below that group was another four-and-four grouping. Those were the songs we had not yet played. I felt like I sould pick one from the bottom group, even though I still wanted to hear Welcome to Paradise again. I also thought about playing one of my favorites, but it was not popular and I didn’t want to kill the vibe. Then I thought about playing the bottom left song, which was a popular song, but not Welcome to Paradise. I was in a thought loop. Finally, I picked one from the bottom left. Right as it was about to play, the dream changed again.

The room was the same room, but now it was dark, like a house party. The music was loud. It was fun. All my friends were still there. Alfredo and Courtney were dancing and laughing. Then Courtney yelled, “You’re wearing my pants!” We all stopped. Alfredo looked down. He was wearing white-blue acid-wash jeans. Around the jeans was a King’s Blue outline, in the same style I use to outline characters in some of my paintings. Courtney was wearing the same pants, but without the outline. We laughed. Courtney wasn’t joking, though. She was a little annoyed. Alfredo stopped dancing and admitted he couldn’t find his own pants that morning. So he just grabbed a pair. They had all been sleeping on the ground and clothes were randomly strewn about. So it was understandable, to some degree. But it was also lazy because he knew those weren’t his pants. I thought it was hilarious, though. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I was in a laughing loop. I laughed so hard I woke myself up. When I woke up I was actually laughing out loud.

Dream 4: The gross shoes

I fell back asleep and had another dream. I was with Brendan. We were outside a round stadium. It was white. It reminded me of Palmer Auditorium in Austin. It was packed. Nobody was allowed in yet. We pushed through the crowd, left-right-left-right, until we made it to the doors. There was more open space by the doors. We waited. I can’t remember what we did. Then they let us in.

The interior was dim and wide. We came in on the middle level. We walked on a wide path. To our right, stadium seats cascaded steeply down to the stage. To our left, the seats went up. There were long wooden check-in tables running along the edge of the landing, to our right. Everyone had to stop and register at one of the tables. There was almost nobody in the theatre. We walked a long time before registering. We were just looking around. Brendan picked a table first. I kept walking and checked in farther down. Brendan sat a section over, close to where he checked in. I sat on the front row of the middle landing, close to where I checked in. I had lots of leg room, which felt good.

I sat there for a while, feeling like I did not want to eat my shoes. We were supposed to eat our shoes. Finally, I took a shoe off and bit into it. It was a tennis shoe. I bit into the toe. It was thick and rubbery. It bit off like cake. It tasted like rubber and meat. It was barely juicy. I couldn’t eat it. I spit it out. I felt ashamed. I went to find Brendan. He had already eaten most of his shoes. “It’s not bad,” he said. But it felt wrong to me. I told him he didn’t need to do that. I told him we should just leave. He shrugged. Then the dream shifted.

Dream 5: The Church Group

I was in a white room again. It was bright and sterile. There were two rows of plastic chairs. They were those old Eames chairs. They were peach-pink. They reminded me of elementary school. There were two rows of ten chairs. The chairs were facing each other. I was in the middle, facing the theater stage, which was way in the background. I was next to my grandmother. Across from us sat a woman. She was larger than everyone else, like a small giant. She was not freakishly large, maybe ten percent larger than a regular sized person. She was confident and intimidating.

It was a church group. I was there because I’d helped them write their book, even though I didn’t believe any of it. I wore a CPAP mask and slouched. There was a lot of talking. I didn’t want to talk. I was a guest.

Near the end, the leader singled me out. She said my writing and design showed proof of my faith. She said I was denying my faith. She said I had strong faith, but I was not admitting it to myself. She wanted me to admit it to myself. She was very happy and excited to help me. To me, it felt manipulative. It felt like she was trying to convert me through compliment.

My grandmother spoke up. She was angry. She defended me, insisting I was a true believer. She wanted to know how that lady could dare question my faith, given all my hard work.

I was in a lose-lose situation. I didn’t believe. I was offended by the small giant's insistence that I was a secret believer. I was also afraid to tell my grandmother that I didn’t believe. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I was smiling big out of embarrassment. The CPAP mask was hiding my smile, thank goodness. But there was a large, round hole on the left side of my CPAP mask. At the right angle, you could see my smile. I kept slouching more and more and more. At some point I was going to have to talk. Then I woke up.

10.18.2025

My house sits across from a chain of retention-pond-lake-things. There's a sidewalk-path that skirts along the mile-long “shoreline.” At the end of my cul-de-sac, the route turns to run behind a block of houses. The house on the corner has the most aggressive dogs in the neighborhood. That house has a tall wrought iron fence that skirts the sidewalk. The dogs have pushed that fence halfway over, trying to get a taste of passersby. I assume the homeowners are aware of the threat their dogs pose, because they wound up installing a fully enclosed chain link cage/box, which is where the dogs seem to spend most of their time now. They are still scary, even from within their cage-inside-a-cage home.

Anyway, I was walking by today and the man of the house was sitting on his back patio blaring (is there a stronger word than blaring?) some kind of Biblical storytime something-or-other. The speaker was speaking assertively about the young Goliath’s battle training schedule or regimen or something like that.

I feel like there's a story in there.

10.18.2025

Last night's dream.

I was in a house, and the house was dark. I don't know if the house was actually dark or if the image in my memory dulled after waking up. I know the mood was dark, at least.

I went down a set of stairs into the basement. The basement was huge. It was between the size of a garage and a small warehouse. It was empty, except for a few cardboard boxes.

There was a roach. It was a filthy, disgusting roach. It scared me. I wanted to kill it. I couldn’t wrap my brain around how to do that. I didn’t have anything to kill it with. I sort of chased it, without any commitment to strike.

I left. I went upstairs. I was two floors up. I wandered among some rooms, frustrated and angry at the roach. Roaches don't normally make me angry. I was aware of that.

There were some people around. They were friends but I wasn’t interested in them.

I went into a room alone. The room was gray-blue. There was a bed. There was nothing on the walls. There was not a window. I wasn’t feeling like myself.

A young girl was in the room with me. She was probably a teenager. I saw a roach. It was a different, smaller roach. I felt embarrassed and frustrated. I felt like, “Jesus Christ. I don’t want to deal with this again.” I thought, “I can’t let this roach be in here with her. I have to kill this roach." I didn’t think she saw the roach.

I got up and went into the other room. It was a bathroom. The sink was straight ahead. The countertop was brown wood. The bathtub was on the same wall as the door. The room was gray-blue. I needed to get something to kill the roach. I found something. It was not a scarf, but it was something like a small, silk scarf. It wasn’t silk. It wasn’t jersey. It was something between those two things. I was curious about it, thinking it had no function.

I saw a roach in the bathtub. It was the grossest one. It looked aggressive. It seemed violent, potentially. It did not have claws, but I felt like it had claws. It had a hard, armored exoskeleton. It was bigger than the bathtub drain. It looked hard to kill.

I stopped feeling scared and started feeling angry. I whipped at it with the scarf thing. I whipped as hard as I could but missed. The roach scurried around the bathtub. I pulled the shower curtain back. I whipped and whipped and whipped and missed and missed and missed.

Somebody came in. I don't remember what happened when they came in. Somehow, I was reminded that I had RAID. Maybe the person asked if I had some. Maybe they told me. I don’t know. I stood very still. The roach stood very still. I slowly sneaked out of the bathroom to get the RAID. I hoped the roach would not move.

The RAID was in the garage. I went down the wooden basement stairs and saw it, just sitting there. It was close to the bottom of the stairs. There was not a spotlight on it, but it felt like it had a spotlight on it. It was a baby-blue-colored bottle. It was a pretty color. Other than the color, it looked the same as a typical RAID bottle. It had bold, black roaches on the bottle. The words said they would kill the roaches. I hesitated for a moment because I knew I had the red and black RAID somewhere in the garage. I didn’t know if the blue bottle was stronger or weaker or the same. I didn’t feel like I had time to search for the red and black bottle, so I picked up the blue one. I looked at it more closely. It seemed the same as the red and black RAID.

I went into the bathroom with the blue RAID. I sprayed the roach. It died fast. Normally, when you spray a roach, they twitch and scurry around and you're not sure if you need to keep spraying them. In this case, the roach twitched and scurried, but only for two or three seconds. Then it died. The spray, I remember, was much more liquid-y than the typical RAID spray. It didn’t spray like a stream of liquid. It sprayed like a mist, but when the mist came into contact with something solid, it left a little puddle.

I was happy that the roach was dead. It relieved some stress. It was easier to kill than I expected. I went into the other room and told the girl I needed her to leave. After she left, I found the small roach. I found it quickly. I sprayed it and it died.

I felt confident and angry. I felt excited. I was excited to go down into the garage and kill that first fucking roach. I was a little worried that I wouldn't be able to find it, even though the garage was big and empty.

I went down to the garage. I almost ran down the stairs. I saw a box to the right of the stairs, maybe thirty feet away. Almost immediately, I realized that the roach was inside that box. The box was the size of a box that dog food would be delivered in.

I stood over the box and looked at it. It was shallow, just a few inches deep. I saw the roach. It was in there holding onto something. I can't remember what it was holding. It was not a living thing. It was bigger than the roach. It was red. It was something like a toy or a doll, but it was amorphous. The roach was dragging the thing around. I felt disgusted and angry.

There were other things in the box, too. I could see the roach maneuvering around the things, but the things were invisible to me. The roach was ducking and hiding, and I could tell there were clusters of invisible masses in the box. I watched for a few moments, then I sprayed. The roach dropped the thing it was carrying. It scurried around and under the invisible things. I was trying to spray around those things, based on the roach’s movements. I sprayed and sprayed. Then the nozzle popped off the RAID. The nozzle was white. I fiddled with the little cylindrical nub that was exposed. I pushed on its size. Liquid drained out, like from a water hose, into the box. It filled half the height of the box. The roach drowned, if it wasn’t already dead. It floated up and around with the little current. I thought, "Oh. I didn't really mean to do that. That was a lot." But at the same time, I thought, "Good. It's fucking dead."

I was left with the cardboard box full of liquid poison. I couldn't leave it. I was worried about the fumes and the mess. But I was so relieved that all the roaches were dead and, more than anything, I just wanted to get out of there.

I went upstairs and into the kitchen. The kitchen was gray-blue. I didn't know if there were more roaches. I felt drained. I felt hungover. Tarra came into the room. Then Uncle Bill was there. He was there to visit. Neither of them knew anything about the roaches.

I felt so happy to see them. That happiness was heightened because I knew the roaches were dead. I felt like I could focus on hanging out with Tarra and Uncle Bill. They said we were waiting for Cousin Travis and that we were planning to go out. That was when I thought, "You know what? I gotta go get that box cleaned up. It’s not safe to hang out in there with the RAID fumes.”

I didn’t know what the fumes would do. I didn’t know what to do with the liquid. I thought, "Maybe I'll take it outside and find a place to let it air out." I also thought about draining it down the sink. I said, "You guys go outside and I'll meet you."

Cousin Travis showed up around this time, but I don’t remember how. I felt happier knowing all of us were there. I felt like I was ready to hang out with them.

We all went down to the garage. There was no garage door. There was a door with eight or ten square glass panels—like a patio door or something like that. We walked outside. It was bright and warm and green. There was nothing but a beautiful lawn.

There were sounds coming from around the corner of the garage. We could hear people in a pool having a good time. I know what we were all thinking: "Let's go over there." It wasn’t about wanting to swim. It was about wanting to be around that energy. I said, "You guys go over there and I’ll meet you." I was thinking how badly I wanted to go. I didn’t want to clean up the roach. But I knew I needed to go back and deal with that roach. I wouldn’t be able to relax if I didn’t.

Then I woke up.

10.17.2025

I don’t see a difference between delusion and motivation.

10.15.2025

Status revisited.

In 2024, I made my second art book. It’s a collection of everything I’ve made since I started making art. I didn’t edit. I didn’t filter. I wanted to end it with something profound. What I came up with was: “There’s only one question that matters — is it compelling?”

Now I cringe at that line. I don’t even know why it felt smart at the time. I know a hundred people who use compelling as their go-to word for things that aren’t. I want to crawl out of my skin. It was a terrible, amateur mistake. It was the note I ended on.

On the other hand, maybe it was fitting, because this year has felt hollow.

I thought I’d found a breakthrough last fall. I thought I was headed in new directions. I made a few pieces I liked, then stalled completely. I spent months trying again, hating everything, second-guessing every mark. I ended up with work built mostly on compromise: roach paintings I sort of liked, but that felt like student work. Conceptually fine, but not alive. Not compelling.

I don’t feel disillusioned. I’m uninterested, which is worse. I’m bored with my own process. I don’t know what makes a great painting, or if painting is even my favorite art form. I love music more. I love words more. I love ideas that unfold. I love the layers of meaning you can find in a lyric or in the scene of a film. Painting doesn’t offer me the same depth right now. It feels like I’m trying to wring poetry out of silence.

And yet, I’ve worked so hard at it. I’ve spent weekends, nights, time I should’ve given to my family. I’m chasing something I can’t name. I look at what I’ve made and I think, “Is this really the best I can do?” Maybe it is. Maybe that’s what the book really was: a box to pack up the best I have … and put away forever. It’s opportunity to move on and not get stuck in mediocrity for the rest of my life. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not failure if you reach your limit.

This month, I quit my job to start an ad agency with two other people. Maybe this is the opening of the next box. We’ve made a few things I’m proud of. It’s terrifying — but also freeing. For once, I’m putting creative work first, fully.

I recognize the never-ending challenge — not just making art for myself but for others. To connect. To be empathetic as well as self-expressive. That’s something I’ve never been good at. I’ve always wanted people to see it my way. But great art, and great ads, make people think they’re feeling seen their way. It’s a trick you have to play on yourself and the audience, too. That’s not easy. It’s easier to trick yourself. That’s the irony. That’s probably why great art is so rare.

So, this is where I am: between boxes. One closed, one barely opening. Maybe I’ve reached the limit of my talent. Maybe I’m just learning what it means to go further. Either way, I’m still here — tired, uncertain, but still trying to make something that matters. I don’t have a reason why.

10.11.2025

I think that sums us up pretty well.