I Am Nobody

I admit to using AI art programs to help me create artwork. But I am not letting AI generate drawings for me. I use AI to add effects and details that my arthritic hands can no longer create. I have been drawing blue-skinned Nebulons for forty years. This picture is my drawing even though the AI finished it (except for the mouth and nose, which I had to redraw to finish this.) In fact, I drew and redrew this particular picture about ten times, something I can do digitally that ink and colored pencil on paper doesn’t allow me to do. One shot is all you get at the process the old way of doing it, unless you spend hours pixel editing with Photoshop. So, I am finished apologizing for the shortcuts I have been taking to make art since I took up digital tools. I get to call myself an artist no matter how offended other artists are becoming with the use of the AI crutches I take advantage of.

I might point out that whatever copyright violations are being done by AI art programs, that is not what I am doing. I am using digital art tools and an AI app that I am feeding my own artwork into. And the corrective decisions are made by me. I am drawing well more than 90 percent of the drawings myself.

But I don’t know why I keep feeling like I have to defend what I am doing. I have been drawing and redrawing and doing art for at least 62 years. And I have never made any substantial amounts of money for anything creative I have done outside of a classroom where I was the teacher.

Why do I worry about my own making of art anyway? I am nobody. Nobody will ever hang any of my work in a gallery. I have never been a commercial artist. I have only been paid a pittance for published cartoons a few times, and royalties for novels and essays a few times more. It never bothered me when I was teaching. I got the feedback I needed from students as I showed them the processes and techniques of being both a good reader and a good writer. I knew from them that my writing abilities were good and were teachable. I had student writers who won writing contests. I took on State tests and achieved writing scores for entire grade levels that were better than the English departments of the small towns around ours. I got real praise from more than one superintendent. I was an English department head and a Gifted Program coordinator. If I ever was somebody, it was then… doing that. 

They told me in writing classes at both Iowa State and the University of Iowa that I would probably one day be a published author, and that I was a talented writer with considerable skill. Well, I’m a self-published author now. One that practically nobody reads. But the ones that do read my books seem mostly to like them, or hate them for spurious reasons in two cases. And I guess that is good enough. Good writers in the past have been ignored until after they were gone. I may remain ignored forever. But the important thing is that my art and my writing exist. For now. And maybe in people’s memories too for a while after that. Art needs to exist for its own sake, Its own secret purposes. And it was only my place to create them, not follow them to their ultimate purpose.

Whatever. I am nobody. And that’s okay. Nobody is really more than that in the long run.