AI + Art

Image: Hayao Miyazaki creating in his studio

The issue of AI generated “art” across various mediums whether animation, visual art, storytelling and music, has been coming up a lot lately. Recently a number of commercial authors through the Author’s Guild US have filed a lawsuit against Meta for sucking up vast numbers of books from platforms featuring pirated books for their large language model AI Llama (the metaphor of AI being a parasite is deliberate!). This has been done with no consideration of legal permissions, intellectual copyright, or compensation to authors. I felt ill reading about how this made author’s feel about their life’s work and creative efforts. Then there has been the inundation across social media of Ghibli AI inspired images that blatantly rips off the aesthetic cultivated over years of creative work of Hayao Miyazaki and Ghibli Studio animators. An interaction has resurfaced as a result from a 2016 documentary on his life, where Miyazaki is shown an AI generated animation of a creepy monster/zombie dragging itself by its head, with the presenter extolling that AI could “present us grotesque movements that we humans can’t imagine”. In response Miyazaki told a story of his friend who has a disability where it was hard for him to raise his arm, so that he found he couldn’t watch this kind of imagery. Miyazaki went on to say: “Whoever creates this stuff has no idea what pain is whatsoever. I am utterly disgusted…I strongly feel this is an insult to life itself.” Miyazaki’s art is deeply human, dealing with universal human concerns, which raises the issue of AI and the very issue of what it means to be human. The brilliant researchers and film makers Aaron and Melissa Dykes at Truthstream Media recently put out a video examining this very nexus of AI, art and human consciousness, What Lies Beyond the Image of Our Humanity?, (click on title to view). I encourage anyone interested in this issue, or is directly impacted by their creative work being sucked into AI models for training or commercial purposes, to watch this and consider the very serious implications of what is happening as AI intersects with human created art.

Miyazaki on creating

Artwork: Drawing by Hayao Miyazaki for My Neighbour Totoro

As a fan of the work of Hayao Miyazaki, his words about creating resonated: "Whenever someone creates something with all of their heart, then that creation is given a soul."

Chasing Light new cover!

I finally had a new cover done for my YA novel, Chasing Light. It features stencil artwork from French street artist Christian Guemy (C215), titled, Love is in the Air (2103, Vitry, France). I’m super happy as I’ve loved this artwork for a long time!

You can check out the Chasing Light synopsis and a few chapters here, and the various stores it’s available for purchase.

OwlKitty does Twilight!

After a long break where OwlKitty’s (aka Lizzie) parents had a child, they’ve come back and produced this: OwlKitty does Twilight! It’s brilliant and hilarious! Check it out.

Ange Fragile

Artwork: Ender, Ange Fragile, 2020

I’ve always found French street artist Ender’s (@ender.artiste) angels moving. This particular paste-up Ange Fragile (2020) perfectly captures a sense of despair or pain, and I featured it alongside my story The Beginning of Something Else (check it out, here). Whether the angel has fallen from grace or is living in disguise among humans, the pathos resonates because it feels so contemporary. I post this today simply because a fragile peace in a small land has been broken, and an already beleaguered people are being terrorised once more. And words never seem enough…

Where have all the flowers gone

Artwork: Anselm Kiefer, Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2025

Two major exhibitions centered on Anselm Kiefer’s art are currently showing at the Van Gogh Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The title of both, Sag mir wo die Blumen sind, comes from the 1955 protest song Where have all the flowers gone by American folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. Kiefer commented that “The most important sentence in this song is ‘When will we ever learn.’ The rest of the song is a little bit kitschy, but this is a deeper thing. We don’t know why things repeat all the time. We have a situation now like in 1933 in Germany, it’s horrible.” The two exhibitions feature twenty-five works by Kiefer, including a major new painting installation at the Stedelijk Museum that combines oxidized copper, paint, clay, army uniforms, dried rose petals and gold, symbolising the cycle of life, death, the human condition and the nature of war.

Kiefer’s affinity with Vincent van Gogh dates back to 1963 when Kiefer won a travel scholarship and chose to follow the route taken by Van Gogh, from his birthplace in the Netherlands, through Belgium and then on to southern France. Kiefer stayed for a few months in Fourques, near Arles, where Van Gogh painted much of his best-known works, such as the Sunflowers series. Regarding Van Gogh, Kiefer said provocatively, “He worked very hard, because he had no talent, you know. The last two years he did all for what he’s now famous. That’s because he didn’t stop. He kept painting and painting.” The exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum presents seven key works by Van Gogh, such as his Wheatfield With Crows (1890), with previously unseen paintings and thirteen early drawings by Kiefer inspired by the themes of Van Gogh’s art, such as natural phenomenon, landscape, seasons, memory and light.

The exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum focuses on Kiefer’s close ties to the Netherlands, specifically the artist’s connection with the museum, which early in Kiefer’s career acquired Märkischer Sand (1982) and Innenraum (1981), a painting which features a view of the skylit chamber of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin where Adolf Hitler once met with members of his military to map out his destruction and seizure of Europe. The reference to World War II was a challenging—even taboo—subject in post-war Germany at the time it was created, and follows on from earlier work by Kiefer such as the Occupations performance piece created when he was a 24-year-old art student and traveled across Europe posing at significant historic sites performing the Nazi salute.

Given that the exhibitions coincide with Kiefer’s 80th birthday, as well as the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps, the subject of his earlier artwork confronting Germany’s Nazi past and the themes of history, memory, silence, time, metaphysics and humanity is a palpable reminder of the need not to forget the trauma and horror of war. While Kiefer said that the new work for this major show isn’t meant to depict politics or any specific world event, he does keep informed about current geopolitics and the escalation for war in Europe. Kiefer references this as he spoke about the process inherent in his art, “When I paint, I don’t paint with my head, it’s with my body,” and that given his knowledge of war, “It’s logical that it comes through. It’s me, my body, that brings it onto the canvas. It’s not intended to warn people, but I do hope it’s a warning.”

Kelly Akashi at Lisson Gallery

Artwork: Sculpture by Kelly Akashi, Lisson Gallery solo exhibition, February 2025

Kelly Akashi’s inaugural exhibition with Lisson Gallery in Los Angeles was tragically intervened by the Los Angeles fires where Akashi’s studio and house were destroyed, alongside so many other Angelenos. The devastating loss did not deter Akashi from going ahead with the exhibition rescheduled a month later in February. Reaching out to locals Akashi was able to crowdsource materials and studio spaces to complete the work, refiguring her sculptures that feature glass, earth, stone and bronze elements. Akashi was able to save some bronze cast and borosilicate pieces from her burnt studio, incorporating these works with their altered patina; a sombre reminder of so much loss, the pieces transformed by fire.

As with previous exhibitions, Akashi’s hands are cast in bronze, holding various objects, or a partial cast of her face features sprouting a natural form, in this case glass branches or horns. Elements from nature such as twigs, seed pods and flowers are reformed in bronze or glass, where organic and inorganic substances are shaped to speak to a poetic, complex and delicate interaction. Akashi also included in this project a number of lace doilies that belonged to her grandmother, heirlooms suggesting her family lineage and the passing down through time not simply of objects but shared memories and experiences of Akashi’s personal history.

Out of tragedy, Akashi triumphed with this exhibition which showcased the alchemical transformation of matter in her art, and of the regenerative potential in nature and life itself.

Rojas at Kanazawa, Japan

Artwork: Adrián Villar Rojas, The End of Imagination I (2022) The Theater of Disappearance (2017), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, 2025

Adrián Villar Rojas’s current installation in the group exhibition Dancing with All: The Ecology of Empathy at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, is an amalgam of two series of works, The Theater of Disappearance from 2017, which had various iterations in Athens, Bregenz and Los Angeles, and the 2020-22 projects, The End of Imagination (I wrote a blog post about the Paris 2020 exhibition).

The element from The Theater of Disappearance series is a large format image of Piero della Francesca’s painting Madonna del Parto (1450-75). The reproduction, depicts a pregnant Madonna, and was originally displayed on the floor at Kunsthaus Bregenz in 2017. It is positioned above a large-scale sculptural element from Rojas’s series entitled The End of Imagination, a chaotic amalgamation of software systems collectively described as the “Time Engine” and created to generate a series of digital worlds, a conflation of the virtual and physical. The sculpture’s state of decay implies environmental and social collapses across time.

Themes of extinction, disappearance, organic and inorganic forms, and time meld with ruminations on human imagination, the nature of art, language and systems of representation. With regards to the Theater of Disappearance and The End of Imagination projects, Rojas made a statement that encapsulates both (as well as other works such as Poems for Earthlings, Paris, 2011) in terms of conception and strategy: "In 2010, I proposed a hypothesis: What if, in the final moments of humanity, the last of the species decided they wanted to make an artwork? It would be the last human artwork, together with all the logical implications unfolded by this fact. The end of art, end of the world and end of language are then one and the same thing: the same end. In my fabulations, reaching the shores of art created a vacuum, a silence that gave space for me to explore nonhuman perspectives. This is when I placed a new metaphor of an alien into this terminal landscape. What I call the ‘alien gaze’ expresses this impossible paradox: a subjectivity without culture."

In the Classroom

Artwork: Painting by Seth, The reader, Qalandiya, 2022, Occupied Palestinian territories

The teacher lifts the chalk—

it snaps

A child flinches,

breath held,

waiting.

 

Outside, the sky groans.

The windows do not shatter—

not yet.

 

A boy at the back

engraving words

on his wooden desk.

His name.

His brother’s name.

A name he won’t say out loud.

 

The fan creaks, slow and tired.

A flicker of light.

A dry mouth.

Only the hush of moving lips—

 

Then—

a distant boom.

The room stops breathing.

 

The teacher drops the chalk,

her hands trembling.

The boy runs his hand over the carving,

dust settling in the grooves.

And weeps, soundless.

 

Somewhere beyond these walls,

silence breaks again.

No one came to help.

 

Poem by Mohammed Arafat, February 26th, 2025

Guayacán

Artwork: Mural by Millo, Guayacán, Medellín, Columbia, 2025

Artist Millo has created yet another wonderful mural for the Medellín Streetart Festival in Columbia. The mural is titled Guayacán, which is an amazing tree found in Medellín, and he wrote this about the project and its inspiration:

“Medellín, is a bustling metropolis, nestled amidst breathtaking natural beauty, I would say an extraordinary urban jungle, where the tropical flora and fauna intertwine with the city’s rhythm, creating a truly one-of-a-kind environment. 
Among these natural wonders, the Guayacán tree stands out, holding a a special place in the Medellín people’s hearts : it’s blooming, lived as a cherished event, it’s a symbol of hope and renewal. 
During my time in the city, I was struck by the numerous stories shared with me about this magnificent tree, each person I met had a personal connection to it, a memory or anecdote that highlighted its significance in their lives. 
My mural artwork aims to celebrate Medellín’s unique way of loving and living in harmony with nature, their profound and fascinating connection, something that I feel sometimes almost lost in this other side of the world.”

Bird on Wires

Artwork: Robin Rhode, Bird on Wires, film still of performance, Berlin, 2025

Contemporary artist Robin Rhode recently did one of his wall drawing, performance installations called Bird on Wires in Berlin, Germany, where he currently lives. Made me think of Leonard Cohen’s song Bird on the Wire. So here are Leonard’s lyrics paired with Rhode’s artwork.

Like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
Like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you.

Like a baby, stillborn,
Like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
And by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
He said to me, "You must not ask for so much."
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"

Oh like a bird on the wire,
Like a drunk in a midnight choir I have tried in my way to be free.

are you happy?

Artwork: Paste-up by Megumi Nemo, Ae You Happy?, Paris 4e

The whimsical and joyful work of French street artist Megumi Nemo, Are You Happy? The puppy helps!

Orka

At the end of last year, a short film was released by AM Art Films delving into the artistic universe of French artist, Charlotte Charbonnel. I’ve written previously on her work, notably an art story, Nebula I (2014, here). The film, Orka: force, énergie en Islandais (Orka: force, energy in Iceland) is an immersive and atmospheric journey documenting a trip in June 2024 made by Charbonnel and a film crew to Northern Iceland. The purpose was to explore the invisible and transforming elements such as minerals, water and sound waves that Charbonnel harnesses to create works of poetic resonance and sensory experiments.

In Iceland “orka” means strength, energy, and the film surveys the power of natural energies and the intersection of art and science. The film showcases many of Charbonnel’s artworks, such as Resonarium (2011), where iron shards form a slime that slowly animates, creating a hypnotic interaction of animal plant and mineral elements.

Throughout the film, Charbonnel’s voice whispers (no subtitles), weaving sound and words that evocatively relates to the artwork depicted, such as vapour, vibration, seismology, turbulence, smoke, magnetism, invisible forces, gravity, frequency, resonance, imagination, astral, texture, matter, impermanence, continuum, cosmology and magic.

Watch, listen, and absorb this brilliant artist’s work and fascination with the essence of creation itself.

Hon (Here)

I first came across Lebanese musician Yasmine Hamdan watching Jim Jarmusch’s film, Only Lovers Left Alive, a brilliant, quirky vampire love story. One of the songs featured was Hal from Yasmine’s album Ya Nass. Both Yasmine’s voice and the song were mesmerising. A few days ago, Yasmine released a single, Hon (Here). It is a song about “A tiny land/With a gaping wound”; beautiful, poetic and heartbreaking. The video is a wonderful animation with subtitles, but here are the lyrics as well:

What happened here?

A collapse

And a mountain of love

Day after day

I am questioning my phone

There is a dead body in my bedroom

Every day they rehearse their killing

I can’t dissociate

Done

What’s left to say

A tiny land

With a gaping wound

Some people linger

And some go absent

Clouds in the living room

Darkness sitting with me

My body is shaking and the TV is on

Done

What’s left to say

A tiny land

With a gaping wound

Some people linger

And some go absent

A Yoshitomo Nara Day

Artwork: Yoshitomo Nara, In the Milke Lake/Thinking One, 2011

Some days I just feel like closing my eyes and shutting the world out…

Running with wolves

Artwork: Kenny Random, running with wolves, Padova, 2025

Italian artist Kenny Random loves the moon. He titled this artwork, Running with wolves. Beautiful.

Chasm

Artwork by Adam Yekuteli, 2025 (@thisislimbo)

I’ve written about Israeli artist Adam Yekuteli’s (aka Know Hope) art before, especially his street art, and how his work delves into the incredibly difficult areas of the relationships between Palestinians, Israelis, the land and each other. His compassion and humanity guides his work, and since October 7 2023, the crisis in his country has been torturous to face, knowing what his people have been inflicting on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Yekuteli wrote this recently and I wanted to post it, as he offers a unique perspective:

“Over the past two weeks, my feed has been full of videos of people returning to their homes in north Gaza. Rivers of people—families carrying belongings, children, the elderly, people on crutches and in wheelchairs—walking through a landscape of rubble after many months of survival and displacement. Most don’t have homes to return to, and many find the remains of dead relatives, whom they haven’t been able to bury and mourn, trapped under rubble.

For years, I’ve heard of a hilltop viewpoint in Sderot, a city in the Gaza Envelope overlooking the Gaza border, where people come to look at the bombardments. I found it hard to believe such a cynical place exists, so while working on a project in the south, I decided to see it for myself.

As I pulled up, I saw buses in the parking area and dozens of people making their way up the hill as if they were on a field trip. I, too, walked up to find multiple tour groups filling the space. One group was people around my parents’ age, and another was of teenage American yeshiva girls. Both had guides speaking about the events of Oct. 7th and past and present mythologies of Israeli military activity.

At the viewpoint were binoculars, through which one could see Jabalia, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanoun, for 5 NIS ($1.50). As guides spoke, people took turns looking through and moving on, largely disaffected.

As they peered at the chasm of human extermination, I wondered if, within this sea of destruction and erasure, they could see any of these people returning to their homes, even if only as small dots moving in the scenery. Lives existing. I wondered if they could see them as human beings, imagining themselves in their place, and perhaps reversing the situation by imagining someone peering through binoculars, watching them from a removed distance.

As we’ve all continued to live our lives alongside this for the past 16 months, I don’t think we fully grasp the depth of the reckoning our society will have to face for generations. Maybe someone who peered through saw, for the first time, what has long been an abstract entity to many—that this reality is real, and that real people are living, suffering, and surviving in it.”

Buy Art

Artwork: By Johnny Otto, 2024

Hilarious. Words by Johnny Otto (@ottophobia). Made me smile 😊

Quiet

Artwork: Mural by Millo, Quiet, Torino, Italy, 2024

Wonderful mural by Millo in Torino, Italy, that he had the chance to repaint after 10 years! It’s called Quiet, and Millo wrote this about it:

“Not everyday you get the chance to paint again in the same place, imagine on the same wall.
It has been really moving to be back 10 years later and see how much people got emotionally attached to my artworks and how strongly are supporting me now.

Hopefully this new Quiet version will last longer!”