"Lemon Drop" Artwork

TJ Silverlake is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. "I consider myself a painter, but I almost never touch paint. I paint with pixels. I consider the digital tools available today to be the true ‘fine art’ tools of our time. For my work to be relevant, I need to be using the latest technology. I need to be out on the edge using these tools; to be engaged with this culture, this time, this world."

Fictional Landscapes. TJ Silverlake has worked with digital since the early 2000s, using terrain generating software to create digital worlds. Snapshots were taken and printed at high resolution. The astonishing detail of the finished pieces intrigued him. He explored digital in the same way he explored painting, developing artistic processes to blend, contour, and layer; with the same respect for composition, tone, light and integrity of color. “Aesthetic decisions are being made at each step. Something I care a lot about is the discipline it takes to do digital artwork. The same discipline that applies to any kind of artistic endeavor."

When he works, he is conscious of the viewer. The scale, detail, tone, colors and visual cues are designed to engage the viewer in a journey, to be drawn into a deeper experience. Fusing hyperreal, abstraction and fantasy, the artwork is complex and multi-layered. It’s not about a quick read.

AI and Art. Since the summer of 2022, he has been exploring AI. "For me, AI as just another tool. I bring to it the same painterly process I use with digital and traditional media. Only with AI, this is done with words. With time and creating thousands of images, I’m creating a vocabulary, looking for series of words that cause an AI algorithm to ‘paint’, to mimic artistic processes."

From the beginning, he avoided the stylistic prompts that are widely used. There are no prompts using ‘in the style of’. "I’m not interested in copying Rembrandt, Warhol or any other artist. My goal is to create original art. The mindset I have as an artist, my experience, is brought to the creation of prompts. As my vocabulary matures, the images evolve. AI produces beautiful and surprising imagery. There is rhythm, movement, at times colors are dancing with each other."

At this point the artist uses AI to generate what are essentially stock images which are then used in the creation of his multi-layered digital works.

"Art engages different parts of our humanity, our emotions and intellect.