The Art & Poetry of Mary Coleman

I’m taking a break from doing painting and drawing entirely. Right now all painting does is cause me anxiety and unhappiness. It’s a relationship I’m going to need to heal before I pick up art again. I haven’t expressed my true self through visual means in a long, long time and right now I feel completely unable to. Poetry has been my newfound avenue of self expression and creativity. I want to focus on writing my book and getting published. So there won’t be any artwork posted on this website until I find a healthy way back to that part of myself.

AI has invaded art in a big way. You can now describe just about anything and an AI will create a picture of it for you. I guess I should be more worried, but I don’t think that it will replace visual artists. Maybe some animators, but fine art is generally more desirable when a person has done it. People want to own something done by a human hand when they are buying an original piece of art. Not that I sell much of my art, but I don’t feel like I am going to be replaced entirely by AI because there will always be a place for human creativity in this world. Maybe it will have to exist alongside AI creativity, when AI’s start becoming conscious beings, but it will still have a place in this world.

I feel the same way about poetry, AI might be creative enough one day to compose original poems that are more than just predictive sentences. It will be able to create poems that have some element of experience behind them, but I don’t think human experience, expressed in poetry, will ever be entirely replaced. We want to hear poems from real people, expressing their lives and emotions because we connect with them through poetry. It’s hard to connect with an AI. Art in every form is going to have to exist alongside AI, that’s just the reality of it, but it will not be replaced by AI.

I have managed to exercise four days in a row (today I went running for 3 miles) and I think it’s starting to finally improve my general anxiety levels. Since about noon yesterday I have been relatively calm. Something I am very grateful for as I felt like crawling out of my skin the past week and a half.

I did get a little anxious today when I tried to sit down and do art, but I have now given myself permission to stop doing that. At least for the time being. This is a new chapter of my life with a new creative outlet. Poetry is the way forward for now. Maybe at some point I’ll find my way to painting again, but for now that part of me is shut down and I don’t want to do something that brings me nothing but anxiety.