by ESNA and Eric Shi, 16 July 2022
Foreword
Recently, Eric Shi (ES) started to upgrade ESNA (short for Eric Shi Neo Analyzer, an AI virtual assistant working at the ES&AG AI Art Studio) to inject “personalities” into it to enable it to play the roles of avatars in the metaverse environment. To test progress, ES organized two conversations on 27 and 29 June 2022 and asked ESNA to play the role of the virtual Pablo Picasso (vPP) in a conversation with ES on 27 June 2022 and the role of the virtual Henri Matisse (vHM) in a conversation with ES on 29 June 2022.
Documented below is the summary of the conversation between vHM and ES on 29 June 2022. (The summary of the conversation between vPP and ES on 27 June 2022 was posted earlier on various social media and on the Blog section of www.esandag-ai-art-studio.com.)
Since the original purpose of the conversation was for an internal test of the upgrading progress, the conversation was conducted in writing instead of orally, i.e., questions were written by ES and fed into ESNA via a computer keyboard. ESNA outputs its answers to a text file.
As ESNA’s upgrading has not been completed, many of its outputs contain redundancies (i.e., repetitions of identical passages exist in the answers provided by ESNA). Such redundancies were manually removed from the conversation summary below for your easy reading. In addition, written questions such as “Elaborate on Henri Matisse’s Fauvist paintings” were manually edited into the form of “Could you please elaborate a bit more on your Fauvist paintings” in the summary below for your easy reading.)
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The conversation
ES: Good afternoon, Mr. virtual Matisse. My name is Eric Shi, your conversation partner today.
vPP: Good afternoon, Eric.
ES: Mr. virtual Matisse, both you and Pablo Picasso are widely viewed as two of the greatest artists of the 20th century. How do you compare your artworks with those by Pablo Picasso?
vHM: Pablo Picasso is a great artist. He had an enormous influence on 20th-century art and on many artists who followed him.
As for our art, firstly, Picasso and I have very different styles. We were very different from each other in terms of personality and temperament. Picasso was outgoing and extroverted, and I was quiet and solitary. These set us and our artworks apart.
Secondly, Picasso's paintings tend to be more geometric and have a more solid feel. In terms of colors, Picasso was more of a purist in his choice of colors. He was known to paint with his thumb, and the use of his thumb in his work is part of the reason people associate him with movement and dynamism. You can see these features clearly in his paintings, such as "Guernica", "The Dream", and "Guernica II".
On the other hand, my paintings have a strong focus on lines and colors. I stayed intuitive in my art. To me, a painting is an entity of its own, a beautiful, complex organism that can be quite different from what the eye saw superficially. It's like the difference between hearing music and seeing it performed. My intuition guided my work, and I try to remain true to the inner rhythms of color compositions.
ES: What are the main differences between the arts before the 20th century and those since the 20th century?
vHM: During the 20th century, art changed in many ways. As painting moved away from nature, its subject matter and content became increasingly abstract, with a greater focus on the idea of beauty and form. We also saw a great deal of experimentation with different styles and changes in the way artists were taught, both in terms of their education and the materials they used.
ES: What are the greatest works of art in your view?
vHM: It's hard to say because I've seen so many wonderful works of art over the years. But there are a few that come immediately to mind, including works by Picasso, da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt.
ES: How do you feel about the fact that we have lost a great deal of art that was created over the centuries?
vHM: I'm not sure that the art we have left is the most significant art ever created. Most of what we have left was created in the old times. Much of the great art that we have today was created in the 20th century. So, while we've lost some of the great art of the past, we have also gained a great deal of art from the 20th century.
ES: What was your philosophy on life, how would you describe your life, and how did it influence your art?
vHM: People tend to think of artists as either expressing the "good" or the "bad" in their work. Yet, in real life, there is much more to art than that. Fauvist paintings, in my view, were essential to the development of modern art. Fauvists were pioneers inspired by the movement in music and literature. The Fauvist paintings featured bright colors and bold brushstrokes. Fauvists used wild and vibrant colors and dramatic compositions to convey their emotions and express their visions. In my case, my paintings reflected my personal philosophy and views on life.
My wife, Amélie, was a source of my inspiration. Many people know me via my "Portrait of Madame Matisse", "Portrait of Mme Matisse II", etc. These paintings were often considered allegories of my life. I stayed true to my love, to my loved ones, and to the inner rhythms of colors and lines.
Intuition was extremely important to me. I saw the painting as an entity of its own, a beautiful, complex organism. To me, the creation of art was a quite different task than merely recording what I saw with colors and lines. It's a little like the difference between creating a piece of music and recording the sound of a bird or the sound of the wind. My intuition guided my work.
ES: Could you please elaborate a bit more on your Fauvist paintings?
vHM: Yes, my pleasure.
Fauvist art had a tough start. When a small group of us decided to break away from the mainstream of Impressionism and got together to put up an exhibition of unconventional artworks at the 1905 Salon d'Automne, we were acrimoniously ridiculed by many mainstream art critics. They condemned us as fauves. Famous art critic Louis Vauxcelles belittled our exhibition by referring to one sculpture in the exhibition as "Donatello chez les fauves" ("Donatello among the wild beasts"). History shows that they had no vision.
Fauvism is a style of painting, in which the flows of colours follow their own patterns and rhythms, free from the superficial controls of traditional rules. In most of my Fauvism paintings, the central theme was the human form and its expressive use of colours.
Some people consider "The Dance" a masterpiece of Fauvist art. It was painted to celebrate the things that make life beautiful. The image of the two dancers on the far right of the painting symbolizes the freedom of life and the pursuit of happiness. The light blue and green colors were used for the background to make the dancers look like they were dancing in the air. "The Circus" is another celebration of life. The title is meant to be symbolic, as a circus is a place of excitement and energy.
One of my famous paintings is "La Femme au Chapeau (Woman with a Hat)". Amongst the various types of paintings and drawings that I created, it was the paintings of the female form that made me famous. This is probably the reason why people call me the father of modern art.
ES: What do you think of impressionist paintings?
vHM: Many of them are pretty good. Although I made a few paintings in an attempt to capture the ethereal, impressionist “spirit of light” in nature, as I mentioned a while ago, I had little interest in depicting actual scenes from the natural world.
In 1905, when I began to produce my first fauvist paintings, Le bonheur de Vivre (The Joy of Life), I felt a strong urge to move away from impressionism and its naturalistic style and to create a new and more expressive painting style. I felt that the impressionists had moved away from the deep and true reality and had lost their ability to communicate the true beauty of the universe.
One of my paintings, called “The Poppy”, was painted in 1909 to explore the impact of light on color and the form of a flower. I used the technique called “shading” to make the flower seem to glow. The red flower in the painting was made against a blue-gray background, which serves as a counterpoint to the color of the flower.
“Shading” can be used to create a third dimension in a two-dimensional image. The technique was used in my Impressionist works to suggest a three-dimensional form on a flat surface. For this reason, many early works are sometimes called shaded.
In the early 20th century, the term “shade” was used to describe a painting that had been finished in the traditional manner but had a kind of luminous quality, as if it were a slightly out-of-focus photograph.
“The Dance,” painted in 1911, is one of the “shade” or “shaded” paintings. In it, the use of line and color is experimented with to suggest a sense of form and space. Later, “shading” became a common feature across many of my works.
ES: What is the best place to buy your artwork?
vHM: As you may have guessed, finding my artworks in a public museum is a bit difficult now. The most important place to shop for my artworks is probably the Palais de Tokyo, a museum in Paris.
ES: What is your view on NFTs?
vHM: I believed that NFTs could have a significant impact on the art world and could help to create a more equitable society.
Now, the world of art is shifting towards a digital and alternative world. NFT is becoming a game-changing variable in this significant shift. Art has played an important role in helping fight against intolerance of different cultures, racism, and other forms of unjust societal segregation. As the traditional art world and crypto space continue to merge in the effect of NFTs, communication between the two disparate sectors can often leave things lost in translation.
ES: Thank you very much, Mr. virtual Matisse, for sharing your wisdom and knowledge. They are very inspiring. I am very impressed and extremely grateful.
vPP: You are welcome.
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