Edith Was Having An Emotion

"Edith Was Having An Emotion" - oil on cradled wood panel, 24 x 36 x 1.5 inches.  Ready to hang.  (click on the image to purchase)

“I was having an emotion, and I hate that.”
― MURDERBOT, Martha Wells, Exit Strategy

Previously on Mayhem at Malarkey Central: ​ the artist, in a fit of determined transformation and housekeeping, went wild with buckets of gesso and obliterated more than a dozen paintings.  She ruthlessly cleared the way for BIG, NEW THINGS!  SHINY THINGS! WEIRD AND WONDERFUL THINGS!   But we know artists, art pressure and the inner critic - will shiny weird things appear?  IS THIS TOO MUCH PRESSURE?  

​Which leads us to a month of Murderbot (if you haven't read the book series, please DO!).  Well, Murderbot and something I'm going to call ballgown-bots.  Because that's where the muse shoved me - putting fancy duds on robots. 

Edith Was Having An Emotion

At least, that's the surface, snarky description of the thing.

The more vulnerable, prickly artist's intuition description is this:  in the search for emotion, can it be found in the thing that has none?  And even further, will a thing without emotion (the AI bot) create emotive inspiration images of those emotionless things?  

And are we, as humans, more than the sum of our own genetic programming and patterns?  Is there free will?  Or are we following a path preordained by DNA and body chemistry?

I fear I've bitten off something rather large.  But let's go anyway, yes?

About the art:  beginning with an existing painting (whose colors were in the vicinity of where this piece was going) and some inspiration images created in a dozen long sessions with the AI bot, I sketched directly on top of the old piece with a paintbrush attached to a long stick - a very long stick indeed!  This kept the initial sketch loose.

Slowly adding the internal layers with walnut oil-thinned oil paint, then painting the background in many loose layers, allowing hints of the prior painting to peek through.  Building layers while trying to resist over-defining the details.  Stepping across the room to judge the impact, then forward again to execute the next step.  About two weeks of drying time on this big piece.