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Four Years of Excerpted Inspirations!

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • 6 hours ago
  • 0 min read
“Friends, we are celebrating the fourth anniversary of Excerpted Inspirations! Looking at Liz’s photo of her harvest of pumpkins, squash, and gourds, with unexpected results of cross-pollination, I think of the materials I’ve collected for making collage art, especially the calendar pages. I often look at a picture and think, ‘That’s pretty, but I don’t know how I’d use it.’ Then weeks or months later, I find it’s exactly what I want. And because almost every page is different from all the others, I don’t want to waste it on a practice version, but save it for the finished piece. This gives a lot of the art an improvisational feel, because it comes together in unexpected ways, often better than I planned. “As for the literary passages, I keep diving deeper into my collection of storybooks, and often a passage will come into my mind spontaneously, along with a suggestion of what makes it a spiritual inspiration. It’s a bit like going into the pantry to see what in my collection of preserved food would be good for the next meal. Enjoy the literary and artistic harvest with us.” -Linda Simonetti Odhner “This Thanksgiving, while turning our garden harvest into a feast, I reflected on my fourth year of Excerpted Inspirations—I realized my art journey this year has ventured further into an area of controversy. So although I know this may be a difficult read, I have to confess to harboring an unpopular opinion: I’ve been using AI tools more often, and I’m starting to really enjoy them. Two years ago they were slow and error-prone, and getting a usable image took hours. Now I can create something close to my vision in just a few tries, and there are even tools for creating music and short videos. It’s a lot of creative power to suddenly have at one’s fingertips. I understand completely why so many artists dislike AI. It consumes energy, was trained on unlicensed data, and raises fears about job loss and disappearing skills. I also feel the judgement directed at those who use it. I think my perspective is different as a graphic artist, because this part feels very familiar. In the early 2000s, people told me my digital art wasn’t ‘real’ because it involved pixels, undo buttons, and no physical ‘original.’ For years I felt confused about it. Was I even an ‘artist’ at all? This year, while baking an apple pie, I had an epiphany. After spending a week generating small AI video clips, I found myself at a kitchen counter, shaping the pie’s top crust into an apple tree, in honor of the apples grown from my own backyard that the pie now contained. It suddenly became clear to me: being an artist isn’t about any specific tool or the technique. It’s about having an inner, imaginative vision, coupled with the drive to bring those internal imaginings into reality. My AI clips and my decorated pie crust had the same origin: I imagined something, and then I made it. To me, this means kids drawing stick figures are artists too. Pencils, paint, cameras, Photoshop, AI—they’re all just tools for making inner visions visible. New creative tools have always caused some people to panic. Folks worried that cameras would end painting, Photoshop would end photography, and now they worry AI will end everything! Yet none of these innovations of the past actually stamped out older artistic forms—they simply expanded what art can be. People still draw, paint, and take photographs. I think someday down the road, we may even have devices that attach to our heads and record our imaginations directly, and I fully expect people will fear those too—until they see what they can do. So what I hope for, now and in the future, is for artists to stop criticizing each other’s tools. If you paint in oils for a museum wall, wonderful. If you write prompts to make an image for Instagram, fantastic. I’ve loved Linda’s collages, Page’s photos, and all the many different tools I’ve used to illustrate this blog over the years. AI isn’t going to ‘steal’ all the art jobs—at least, it hasn’t stolen this one. I firmly believe humans will still be needed to create, curate, and emotionally interpret art, because feeling emotionally or spiritually moved by art isn’t an ability that computers can be endowed with. Markets will shift, as they always do, but art made by humans to share a piece of human imagination isn’t going extinct. Some artists will embrace new tools while others will prefer traditional ones, and that’s okay. I encourage everyone to use the tools you love, and let others do the same, and hold space open to enjoy the diversity of creativity. Thank-you for being with us these four years, and I look forward to the continuing journey.” -Lisa S. (Liz) Kufs
Squash that appear to come from Liz's garden spill from an AI-generated cornucopia in an autumn cornfield. A billboard that says "www.deborahstree.org" rises above the corn. The image has the feel of a still-life painting, but then an AI-generated turkey walks across the frame.

 
 
 
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