Behind the AI-Assisted Images

I want the images on my website to represent my work well, but I also want them to be grounded in the reality of my actual life and painting practice.

Some of the portraits, studio images, process images, and lifestyle imagery on this site are created with the help of AI. They are not documentary photographs, but I work hard to make them reflect my real appearance, artwork, home, materials, and working methods as closely as I can.

This page is a look at the ordinary real-life photographs and snapshots behind those images.

Why I Use AI-Assisted Imagery

I’m an artist, not a professional photographer, and producing good photography by myself takes a surprising amount of time and effort.

It can mean setting up tripods and cameras around the house, figuring out lighting and angles, moving things in and out of the frame, taking dozens of photographs, and cleaning a room before I can photograph anything in it. Not to mention making sure the laundry is done first!

Then it requires hours upon hours to edit the photos on a laptop that feels that it's really too old to handle this fancy photography software.

I also work from home with four young children. Real life here includes toys, laundry, crumbs, sticky fingerprints, interruptions, and children walking through the frame. I don’t particularly want tripods and cameras set up everywhere, and I don’t want to shoo my kids out of their own home because I need a photograph for my website.

Most of all, I don’t want photography to take over the time I need for painting, running my business, and being with my family.

AI gives me a way to create polished, useful, and reasonably accurate images without turning every photograph into a production.

What I Try to Keep Accurate

Using AI does not mean I simply generate an image and put it on the website. I compare, correct, revise, reject, and regenerate until I have something I believe represents reality closely enough to use.

The artwork matters most. If one of my paintings appears in an AI-assisted image, I work painstakingly to make the painting itself as accurate as possible. I compare the composition, color, proportions, and recognizable details against the real artwork.

I want the person to look like me. I don’t publish an AI-assisted portrait unless I would recognize the woman in it as myself if I looked in the mirror. My children have said the images look just like me—except that apparently virtual me wears different clothes.

I pay attention to the materials and process. I aim to use believable brushes, paints, palettes, papers, surfaces, tools, and working methods that reflect what I actually use and how I actually work.

I want the surroundings to feel true, too. The goal is to reflect the kinds of spaces I really live and work in, not to invent a glamorous studio or a different life.

Not every shirt, chair, object, or arrangement is necessarily something that existed in exactly that form. AI sometimes rearranges my furniture or gives me a different wall color. Sometimes I have extra easels. But I try very hard not to use anything that gives a false impression of who I am, what my work looks like, or how I make it.

What These Images Are — and Aren’t

An AI-assisted image is still an AI-assisted image. It should not be mistaken for a documentary photograph of a particular moment unless I specifically identify it as one.

What I am trying to preserve is the underlying reality: my appearance, my paintings, my materials, my working habits, and the kinds of spaces in which I actually live and work.

The goal is not to invent a prettier or more impressive life.

It is to use the tools available to me to represent the real one accurately enough for the purposes of my website without letting photography take over my life.

The Real Life Behind the Images

The photographs below are ordinary snapshots from my home, workspace, materials, and painting practice.

Some are phone photos. Some are imperfect. Some contain the normal clutter of actual life. Some show a shelf that needs to be dusted or a floor that needs to be vacuumed.

That is exactly the point.

They are here so you can see for yourself the real places, materials, artwork, and working process that inform the AI-assisted images elsewhere on the site.

What about the Artwork?

The artwork itself is different.

None of my paintings are generated by AI. Ever.

I don't even use AI references.

Every original is made by me, by hand, using physical art materials on real paper, canvas, or panel. I work from my own references, direct observation, ideas, and imagination.

AI helps me show the work online.

It does not make the work.