AI and Every Picture Tells a Story

If you’ve been following me for a while, you know I’ve always had a bit of a push-and-pull when it comes to sharing my art. But I’ve decided: if I’m not going to do what I really want to do, why do it at all?

So I talked it out with ChatGPT and came up with a simple, consistent schedule that focuses on what I truly enjoy: woodworking, building projects, and painting. Here’s what to expect moving forward:

Content Schedule:

• Every first weekend of an even-numbered month: Woodworking project video(You might’ve seen the last one, those traditional planter boxes.)
• Every first weekend of an odd-numbered month: Instructional painting video(Small, casual paintings like the ones I’ve shared before. A few of you have even painted along with me, thank you for that.)

In between: Expect woodworking tips and other DIY home improvement content as projects come up.

Now, back to the idea that every picture tells a story.

Almost 20 years ago, my wife Laurel and I visited our friend Francis Cunningham at his studio in the Berkshires. That day, Francis and I painted together. He helped me see the landscape in a whole new way.

I painted a small view of the trees in his apple orchard. Francis painted the pump house and gave it to Laurel as an anniversary gift. Later that day, we sat and talked about art, nature, and seeing.

I asked if I could record him. Here’s a bit of what he said about color and the landscape…

"One of the things that people don't see today is the absolute exquisite beauty of all the grays in which nature adorns herself. They think that color, and we've been made to feel this way with the art of the 20th century. Bright and shiny and loud and even as refined as it is in Matisse, it's so red, yellow, and blue. Lord, lord, lord. What nature is if you look at it and relax your eyes so that you take in a whole field is this atmospheric gray we might say or as Dickinson would say the blue smoke that unites everything that harmonizes everything that takes the redness out of the red and makes it go with the green and makes it go with the yellow and everything else and makes a harmonic and so you get in the nature something like that ping of a more intense color which is made to work by all the more neutral colors warm and cool around and about it. How exquisitely beautiful." Francis Cunningham.

Thanks for being here. I’m excited about what’s ahead.