Wilf Tilley

A series of six, large drawings (originally nine) shown in Japan in the early 1990s, both in Kobe in an exhibition sponsored by the British Council, and in Tokyo. The drawings were restored and re-framed in 2001: 77 x 55 cm, pastel, graphite and chalk on Canson paper. (Private Collection, Japan)

Six ink and oil wash drawings from the mid 1990s. The works were last exhibited in 1998 in Japan, but are now too fragile to show. The images shown here are cropped for online reproduction. Two works from the series are missing.

This is a first, facile, visuo-verbal Turing experiment with an AI art generator (NightCafe) that uses word prompts. I utilized the stable diffusion selection and bounced images around between the styles available in January 2023. I decided to use William Shakespeare’s, so-called, Dark Lady sonnets for my word prompts – choosing a line or lines from each that I considered best expressed the mood of the sonnet collection as a whole. There is much speculation about the identity of Shakespeare’s lady who is described as having black hair and eyes and dun colored skin. Interestingly, when working on sonnet 130, I chose the lines, “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.”, but the program informed me that I was using prohibited words – presumably, ‘breasts’. This problem aside, the program produced interesting, if arbitrary images: arbitrary that is, in its inability to parse erotic, poetic description from prose descriptions of physical attributes. Possibly when algorithmic reproduction of human thought passes the Turing test, the algorithms will recognize iambic pentameter and the sonnet form, and I will be allowed to use the word ‘breasts’. I have attached the sonnet in question to each image and denoted the words I used as generators. The provenance of the starter images is unknown (and Getty Images, I notice, is in the process of suing stable diffusion for unlicensed use of photographs). There is also some discussion as to what constitutes novel iteration of primary images, so perhaps authorship of these images should read: W. Shakespeare and W. Tilley et al. (Following download, the images were re-sized to 720px for publication, and edited for tone, color and contrast, otherwise the dark lady and her poetic attributes are AI artifacts. There is a second experiment (unpublished) based upon a well-known poem by Andrew Marvell (1621-1678 'To his coy mistress'.

Following bilateral eye surgery in the summer of 2021 and implantation of new lenses, Wilf Tilley began a series of unusual paintings executed over black, gesso ground. Although categorized as outsider art because of their visual style, they are sui generis and unique as a series – small in number and executed over a short period of time they atypical of the artist's other work.