Artist Alan Lacke on painting a new dimension with generative ai

Alan Lacke Cairo is a Havana-based graphic artist who has now grown an art and design studio under his name. He told us how he found balance in incorporating AI with his manual creative process, and how it has paved a new way of exploration for his next creation.

I first studied graphic arts in Havana, Cuba where I delved into long studies of colour, gesture and form. I was focused more on the technique of painting output at the beginning, which led me to explore different aesthetics and styles of my work. My way of working today is slightly different as I am now developing more series of thematic works, where everything is visually and conceptually related.

Before focusing as an artist, I worked in a graphic workshop and print shop for several years. This was the time when I got hooked on the process of creating artwork out of a good print, and inspired to create artwork with my creative ideas in a more free way. I have this vision that an artistic career can be frustrating, but it can also be as much rewarding. For me, this balance somehow creates the discipline where artists must make extra sacrifices to achieve the right state of mind to create an artwork.

This happened until last year when I started to use AI in the studio, where it took away most of the sacrifices I needed to make to create an artwork. As most of my work is done manually with painting, I treated AI more like a creative tool to help me catch inspiration when creating a new creative work. It’s an effective process that gives me a fresh perspective on my creation that I haven’t seen before. I feel it’s much easier now to innovate with my artwork without losing my sense of style.

At the beginning of my discovery with AI, I tried different tools like Midjourney, Chat GPT and PixVerse, but nothing worked as well as exactly.ai on my artwork. I love how exactly.ai allows me to create an AI model in my own style just by training it from my original artwork. All the works generated with this turned out to be so much closer to my artistic thinking than the rest of the generative AI tools. I also think it’s very important how exactly.ai always makes me feel secure that all the generated images ownership remains in my hand as the artist.

I am now working on a new series ‘Universe in Perspective’ where I’m exploring the intersection between point, line and perspective in abstract art. I want to create a work that could bring the viewer a tangible experience of seeing different dimensions and visions when they see my work. This inspiration came from the macro and micro universe and I merged the two to create a work that connects human reality with the mysteries of the cosmos.

For me personally, I take this series as a reflection of how we perceive our surroundings. I put depth and alignment of the elements in play as a reinterpretation of spatial construction compositions. Through this, I want to evoke the sensation of immensity within the large and tiny particles. I combined the technique and emotion to take the viewer into an immersive experience, where art becomes a bridge between the visible and the invisible, the known and the unknown. One for sure, I always have exactly.ai in hand to help me conceive new ideas with some models as a reference in the process of this series.

As an artist who is creating artwork out of a manual painting process, I feel very empowered by the existence of digital AI tools like exactly.ai to assist me in my creative process. I generate a lot of ideas to discover new shapes, patterns and concepts for my artwork. It’s like fresh air that allows me to spend more time on the creative process and automate all the repetitive labour in my work. Some may still have their own setbacks on AI replacing human creativity–but I believe that it’s collaborative work. I also take it as my commitment to innovation, and a willingness to embrace advanced technologies as part of my creativity.