“All Souls” is my first earnest oil painting, and a 4’x3’ at that. It’s in a realistic style, although the scene is surreal: As you can see from the Wombo Dream.AI demo, the subject is a white mouse, unfortunately often bred as a test subject. Its innocence here is highlighted by the rainbow bridge in the clouds, or glory rainbow. In addition to being a marvelous optical phenomenon, the glory is a powerful spiritual symbol in multiple traditions, of purity, protection and divine presence or essence, as Buddhism expresses. This layout was initially inspired by the fact that I saw an actual double glory one sunny afternoon at Christian Science Fountain. After I saw this, I felt more or less obligated to make the painting!
The piece is absolutely supposed to be making a statement against animal testing and to respect animal sentience. This has been an area of activism for me for the past few years. And fortunately, with growing public awareness, concern and more enlightened leadership, as of the end of 2022, animal testing is no longer required by the FDA and NIH (difficult though that was for me to fathom in the first place!) Even better — the NIH has been actively encouraging replacement with far more efficient and technologically current methods, and involving AI and machine learning. These “NAMs” or “Novel Alternative Methods” like are computationally based or “in silico,” while others are “in chemico” and cell-based “in vitro.”
It’s wonderful to this bright side of tech coming full circle, computer science aiding ethics and evolution, in best form helping humans to be humane.
Here’s the description of the painting that I gave the AI art program: “White Mouse Sitting On A Cloud In A Blue Sky With Fluffy Clouds, Surrounded By A Large Tigle Or Glory Rainbow.” And it even embellished with the data prophetic inclusion of the eclipse, the image generated well before the eclipse. In my Instagram post I typed: “The eclipse of animal testing then?”
The painting part of the oil painting at this point is underway, and while very different from the AI rendering, the demo version provided me with some guidance for the vision. I value what was beautifully generated, yet still also want to complete the physical painting. So in this case Wombo.dream has been a very useful artistic tool, in pushing me to realize a new style and develop skills.