DALL-E

Last year, I was playing around with DALL-E, an artificial intelligence model that generates images from text. Each of the “artworks” below was created using the prompt: “Modigliani painting of beautiful woman having a spiritual crisis.”

Speaking of spiritual crises, isn’t contemplating the future of AI enough to cause some serious existential dread?

Illustrated postcard - New York City scene.
“Central Park, Stein and Goldstein carousel,” an illustrated postcard by Betsy Shepardson.

The Birth of a Flower

Bouquet.

“Lo, from what quiet earth does such wild beauty escape?”

There are a hundred mysteries in the birth of a flower. From the humble ingredients that roil and toil – dirt, seed, water, light – to the dauntless progress of root and stem, the slow but inexorable act of becoming plays itself out, scene by scene, as the days pass on.

Whether or not you bear witness to this miracle depends, in large part, on whether or not you marvel when the moon rises or the nightingale sings. It’s all a matter of learning the language that Nature speaks.

But don’t despair if you haven’t yet mastered her wild tongue. The possibility of beauty is still close at hand. Just open your eyes a little wider and look out your window, toward the patch of garden a few feet hence.

There you’ll find a flower waiting impatiently on the cusp of desire, ready to unfold and begin its petalous life under the white, hot, inextinguishable sun.

"All good things."
“All good things are wild and free.” – Thoreau.
The Sun and the Sea (mandala).
Journal art: “The Sun and the Sea.”

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Pablo Picasso

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