Peter Blake, "Fans of Mandarin Oriental. AI on Canvas”, 2023

"Fans of Mandarin Oriental. AI on Canvas” - A signed, limited edition silkscreen print on Somerset Radiant White 410gsm paper by Sir Peter Blake x AI Artist.

INTERNATIONAL ORDERS: £1,250.00 excl. VAT

"This is a world’s first. A Peter Blake-designed collage of faces created in real time by a robot. The advent of AI has been treated with suspicion by some artists and illustrators who see it as a threat to their individuality. However, Blake has no concerns and simply says that these artists should ‘just stay away from it. You don’t have to use it. My hope for it is that it takes its place in the armoury of an artist. It’s no more important than the pencil or the brush.’

Peter Blake has seen the potential of the new medium of AI in the same way that artists like Degas, Delacroix or Courbet did with photography, the radical new technology of their own time. As with printmaking, key to the success of the concept is the collaboration with those who have the technical expertise to guide the artist through a complex process - one thinks of Picasso or David Hockney working with master printer Aldo Crommelynk, for example - and an entrepreneur with the vision to see the possibilities of matching a specific artist with a new project, such as when the dealer Ambrose Vollard commissioned some of Picasso’s most significant prints.

In this case, the technical expertise came from the Studio of Art and Commerce who were matched with Blake by the respected and innovative agency, LONDON Advertising. To make this piece, over two-hundred guests were photographed at the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong as they were arriving and then, in an arrangement conceived by Blake with a nod to the Sgt Pepper construction of over 50 years earlier, AI converted these images into drawings as executed by a Chinese calligraphy brush.

‘It’s a kind of magic, isn’t it?’ says Blake, ‘to actually watch this line appear’. What particularly impressed him was the robot’s ability to replicate the subtlety of the human hand, with cursive marks shifting from delicate touches to broader sweeps in one continuous movement. Breaks in the strokes, as the brush lifts momentarily off the surface of the artwork, add a sense of lively animation.

Recent publicity has treated as remarkable the idea that Blake, now aged 91, should become interested in working with an AI robot. However, it is exactly what we should expect from him, one of the most original, creative and inventive artists of our time."

- Text credited to art historian Colin Wiggins.

See Guardian link for further details: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/nov/05/peter-blake-possibilities-ai-endless-for-art

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