Table of Contents

Summary and Reflection

Larger versions of my paintings are under Exercises, but I reference them here to aid the summary.

Changes since prior submission to my tutor:

  • Expansion of reading roundup, referencing articles in preparation for Project 9.
  • A discussion reflecting/combining my thoughts on Global Networks, Surveillance and Voyeurism.
  • A note on an upcoming show
  • Project 4 can be found here

I am not an Abstract painter, however …

Martin Young (2025) Steps 5, Guidance 3, A Man Laying in the Grass. [Oil on canvas panel] 30.5×30.5cm.

I quickly fell down a long path of exploring the capabilities (and inadequacies) of image generation. I’ve been very interested in generative processes, but haven’t thought of them as part of a practice I wanted to pursue. Contradictory, yet true.

I also don’t see myself as an abstract artist. I struggle with anything that begins to approach the abstract, as much as this theme does. I was reflecting on this while at my office: At my very technical job, I think abstractly and laterally, but in my artistic practice, I tend to approach things from the concrete and the real.

However, I found that by breaking the Stable Diffusion image generation model, I was able to create references and ideas that hover in the space between real and abstract. I like the potential and have made a note for myself to explore it further later. In the exercises below, I have done some painting from these results and shared some of the ‘broken’ generative results.

Posthuman Assemblage

Collage is such a bugbear for me. Every unit with the OCA so far has touched collage, and it is always a struggle. Perhaps I don’t associate meaning with the physical in the right way, and yet my work with beads in the prior theme suggests otherwise.

Creating Guidance 1, Steps 5 I was attempting to pull on this idea of posthuman collage and achieved something else entirely. A sort of analog method of replicating what the GenAI diffusion model does when it tries to create an image.

Martin Young (2025) Guidance 1, Steps 5. [Acrylic, paper, cotton fiber, ceramic and glass beads on birch panel] 60.9 x 60.9 cm.

Surveillance/Voyeurism & Global Networks

The readings and thinking that occur during my mental meanderings of the Surveillance/Voyeurism components, and Global Networks components, of this theme have led to something of a merged thread around social media networks and my own artistic engagement with communities there.

I had written something of a self-reflection (below) and this has evolved into something I want to explore further. I think that exploration will be in the form of this unit’s later essay and research work. I haven’t yet formulated a question(or set of questions) to explore, but research is starting to stack up. Early readings are noted below in my reading roundup.

It is interesting that this keeps coming up. As I was reviewing my work from my prior unit, I was reminded of my response to an artist my tutor had suggested: Jenna Gribbon. Very clearly a chord had been struck with me on how this artist focuses and presents their subject matter. I’m reminded of my own social media practice, and how my models suggest imagery to me for create — dancing on this line between inviting voyeurism and avoiding surveillance in social media.

I didn’t end up pursuing the exercises in Global Networks, as my creative brain was being pulled towards the final works I created for this theme instead — blending the AI hallucinations into my painting practice.

As I write, however, I can see something of a linear or geometric network forming between the models I paint, in relationship to my own physical space. Something for later, perhaps, to consider. I can already see the hotspots in my mind — New York, L.A., and Berlin. An interesting reflection of gay male loci and sex work.

Surveillance Potential Project

I had the idea of using eye-tracking software to watch me as I painted. I was curious if I could project the paths of that surveillance back onto the painting via some form of intervention. I didn’t pursue it as I wasn’t able to get my code up to the right level of fidelity that I needed. It is surprisingly (disturbingly) easy to deploy eye tracking capabilities.

Perhaps something for the future, to pursue.

Reading and Research Roundup

Project Readings

Looking at Artists

Thomas Ruff and Tacita Dean came up in my podcast cycle as I have been working through this section. Their photography has come up frequently across my research, and Ruff’s “jpeg jpeg gs02” hangs at my local gallery- a recent gift to their collection. Seeing it in person is quite interesting, as I can spot the algorithmic effects of the jpeg compression algorithm: where it finds ‘interest’ and where it blurs the colours together. It struck me as very painterly, and found myself thinking about it frequently as I was working through exercises.

I spent a chunk of time at the AGO looking at the image to the right, as well as visiting The Culture exhibition which felt overlapping of the many themes I’ve been roughly tumbling around in my skull regarding social media culture in the gay male space. Strange how things overlap and tangle.

The Modern Art notes podcast on Jack Whitten also feels like it is parallel in some form to my thinking. His use of objects, his “developer”, as part of an almost generative-adjacent process. I felt echoes of my use of the AI for reference material here.

I don’t think I have any pithy or insightful here, yet. I can feel the dark shapes at the back of my mind moving around, but they haven’t quite assembled into something coherent enough for words.

Thomas Ruff (2007) jpeg jpeg gs02. [chromograph print with Diasec]

Exercises

Poor Image w/ Stable Diffusion

The themes of the syllabus – degradation, appropriation, blurring – got me in mind of using the Stable Diffusion models to manipulate imagery. Setting it up was fairly straightforward, but perhaps I can chalk that up to being a software engineer.

Avoiding Appropriation, I set the model up to consume my painting and iteratively passed it back through the model a hundred times. I gave it a prompt which described the original painting and then only let it adjust the input image by 30% at a time. Aggregating these together into an animation, we see my painting dissolve into dreamland and then into something geometric.

It is very interesting to see where the model falls apart. I follow this up by making a couple of quick sketches of the final generated frame, back into oil paint. It might be interesting to do that final frame again, in larger form, and add it to the animation as a “book-end.”

More partial results. I found it interesting to pass in notes like “in the style of Egon Schiele”, “John Singer Sargent,” or “Gustave Courbet”. It was far better with Schiele than any others in my tests. In all cases, I stopped the model before it could finish the images, and in some, I felt like I could spot some of the underlying paintings or photographs it was trained on- not in specifics, but in tone. It was rather unsettling.

Martin Young (2025) Steps 5, Guidance 3, A Man Laying in the Grass. [Oil on canvas panel] 30.5×30.5cm.

The above painting was painted from one such generated reference. “Steps” refers to how many cycles of randomness are removed from the digital image. Typically, this would be at least 20 to produce a recognizable image. “Guidance” refers to how closely the model sticks to the prompt provided. Internet resources suggest this should be somewhere in the range of 6-8. A value of three produces many hallucinations. Doing this a 2x or 3x the size might produce a very interesting painting and would allow more effective use of different brushwork, glazing and so forth.

Other Degradation

Weaving images together. Took me a few tries to get something that worked. For this one, I chose the covers of two magazines: Plein Air Magazine (February 2025) and Nuvo Magazine (Winter 2024). I don’t have a subscription to Nuvo; it just sort of showed up in my mailbox- futile advertising, I suppose. Mixing its cover, of a male figure and Plein Air magazine’s cover of a painting of winter trees, felt like an interesting blend of the subject matter I tend to chase in my paintings.

If I were to do this again, I’d make the strips thinner so that more of the images could be perceived.

I went in with a silver pen and redrew the model roughly over the top of the squares of painting. I like the effect, and at a large size, that might be worth experimenting with.

Censored Image

Censorship got in the mind of self-portraiture. I could do more here, I think, as I quite enjoyed the smearing effects, and could go much further with them. I took a few photos and messed around with them digitally, and then used them as references for further painting. Most were messes, to be honest, but these turned out fairly okay.

I found I preferred to paint the image ‘whole’ and then censor it. Ie, paint my self-portrait and then blend it away. Rather than painting the distorted form directly. This had the curious effect of me loosening up and painting with more abandon than I normally do – perhaps because I knew I would be ‘destroying’ the image later.

before
after

In the image above, I was painting on a cheap canvas panel. When I swiped across it with a spatula, the canvas held onto paint in the pores of the weave. I liked the effect and let up on the pressure as the spatula moved across, resulting in the dry brushing effect on one side. This is something I want to work with again, larger, and perhaps even come back in to repaint some components. I’m not sure. It might be very interesting, as well, on much thicker paint as there is a ridge left above, which was visually interesting.

Not as successfully, I used a very wide bristle brush to see what it might do. I don’t like the streaky effect of this one.

Dropping my self-portrait size to 8×10 pixels let me create this image once I blew it back up again. Each pixel becomes just the average colour at that spot. It’s interesting how you can still see a face here, but the identity has been wiped away.

This was a strangely laborious painting. Even though there are only 80 squares, each one requires individual colour mixing and remixing to ensure the right relationships with the surrounding pixels.

It’s not perfect, but it was fun.

As a series, I quite like how they work together.

Analogue/Digital Collage into Painting

Wow, I went off in a different direction here. As I was trying to figure out how to address this exercise, I started thinking about how generative AI “denoises” an image from randomness into something solid. You could think of it as a process of structured hallucination: From a space filled with random noise, the model is progressively run to identify lines, forms and colours, slowly building towards an image over many steps of removing that random noise. It is told what is in the image, and then goes and tries to find it in the noise.

Could I attempt something similar? The process followed was this:

  • Beginning with layering up acrylic mixed with pumice and then shaving it down to create interesting textures. Shaving out spaces and trying to see forms.
  • Using various materials to try to build towards those forms that might be present.
  • After a few steps, I stopped and saw where I had gotten to.

Which resulted in this. Sort of a weird, muddy mess with a hint of… bodies? maybe?

I quite like the tactility of this, and its larger size means there is more to visually explore. More space for this to come together. I think it could use being bigger yet.

Martin Young (2025) Guidance 1, Steps 5. [Acrylic, paper, cotton fiber, ceramic and glass beads on birch panel] 60.9 x 60.9 cm.

Supplementary Materials

The Lonely Palette Podcast

Episode 68 Felix Gonzalez-Torres

I had the honour to provide the introductory description for Tamar Avishai’s episode on Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Every episode, she has individuals lend their voice to describe the physical appearance of the object in question for the episode. Sometimes, she draws from attendees at galleries, family and friends, and others.

For this episode, it was myself. As one of my two favourite art history podcasts, I’m going to remember this for a long time. This episode was motivated partially by a conversation she and I had and partially due to her hearing that one of the lightbulbs in this work had gone out. She had apparently wanted to do an episode on this artist for some time, and these confluence of events motivated her to move forward.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1991) Untitled (March 5th) #2. [40-watt light bulbs, porcelain light sockets, and extension cords.] Installation height: 287 cm.

Self-Reflection on the Topic of Social Media

I am chronically online. I grew up before the internet, but also on the internet: My father was a professor, and I had access to the pre-public networks through his access at the university. BBSes, Gopher, and email via Fidonet, and the first amazing explosion of the web: These were what defined my youth. Even today, if you can name a social media platform, I probably have an account there. Even if I don’t use it, I like to “cyber squat” on my chosen usernames so that others can’t impersonate me.

Why would I care about that? Well, one of those online identities has thousands of followers. It is a username through which people – gay men, primarily – send me images of themselves seeking to be painted and to have that created painting shared back onto that internet. I’ve painted random people, professional figure models, adult film stars, sex workers and even some individuals who might be publicly recognized if I didn’t take steps to conceal them. This online persona has been invited to participate in art shows, zines, and magazines in the social media sphere. Invitations I have declined for one reason or another.

These paintings are nothing special; for me, they each serve as experiments in materials and methods of painting: practice and sketches. For the models, they are sometimes a mechanism of advertising themselves to other artists, or a mechanism of getting more visibility and sometimes a way of finding paid jobs. It is an interesting online culture. These paintings will likely be the first things I sell when I finally finish setting up my online store.

I don’t know how I should be interacting with this side of my practice. I refer to it in my school work, as I’m doing here, but I have not shared anything from it in my learning log. I cannot ever have it overlap with my professional life. And yet, strangely, it is the art for which I am most known, even if those followers do not know who I am.

What is my relationship with this practice? How should I connect my studies and research to it? What will I do when a show possibly goes up next winter in Paris with my work in it? I don’t (yet) have answers.

In some strange way, I think of these works as resistance. Defiance. Fighting back against all the fear I felt growing up.

First (Group) Show

As I write this, I’m preparing five works to send to a gallery in Palm Springs. The self-reflection above was written before this opportunity arose, and yet I presciently wrote, “These paintings will likely be the first things I sell…” Also, above, I mentioned that I had generally declined invitations to participate in various online shows, zines, etc..

Well, something has changed, and I think that change is that the invitation came from the world of the real. This wasn’t an event where some pixels would be put on screen, but one where my works would participate in a physical conversation with other artists’ works. That appeals. It is in the Realz. It is IRL, so to speak.

Of course, it happens during all this chaos between the US and Canada, and I have to figure out how to get my work across the border in an expedient way. So many complexities.

It was an interesting experience talking with the gallerist, walking through my works, and him selecting the ones that would fit his show. He mostly selected a series of figure sketches on paper, such as the one at right. I like them, certainly, but they don’t feel to me like something that would go in a show. Unless there are a dozen or more of them. But he knows his market better than I do.


Martin Young (2024) Rik. [Oil on paper] 28 x 20cm.