Dear Rachel

Dear Rachel,

I am writing to you from 2021 to thank you for the inspiration you have given me. I hope you will be happy that your work has spoken to people across the centuries. I have only seen a few of your original paintings but I can now happily enjoy many of them digitally via something called the Internet.

This will sound strange but it means your paintings have been converted into a series of ones and zeros; they get broken up into little packets of information that flow down wires and tubes to arrive safely in my home where they reassemble into your beautiful artworks.

I would love to be able to have a conversation with you about your inspiration, and how against the odds you became a successful female painter in your time. From what I have read this will not have been easy, I imagine you as someone with lots of motivation and a passion for what you painted. Please know your efforts have not gone unnoticed and the sacrifices you must have made have helped other women who have followed on from you.

I’ll write again soon.

Many thanks,

Dawn

This image was created using a GAN. A form of machine learning that uses two neural networks: a generator and a discriminator. I’m still not sure I fully understand how it works but it goes something like this – imagine an artist is painting some original still lives (the dataset) and a forger (the generator) is trying to create something similar. The discriminator, a neural 'detective', then tries to determine what is an original painting and what is fake. A GAN can take many hours to train (most of mine train for at least 3 hours) and as it is training both networks keep developing so each side keeps learning the other’s methods.

GANs were introduced in 2014 and are now being used by many artists as part of their practice. In 2018 Christies sold a GAN portrait for $432,000.

Still life painting has a long heritage that can be traced back to at least the Egyptians. Known in France as 'Nature Morte' (dead nature) the English term is said to come from the Dutch ‘stilleven.’ Many still life paintings employed symbolism as a commentary on the human condition, including vanity, mortality and wealth. As a hierarchy of artistic genres emerged in the 17^th century Still Life painting was determined as the lowest of genres, this categorisation was based on what was described as the difference between creatively expressing universal essences, and those regarded as mechanical copying. Despite the lowly position of both still life and female painters at the time, Rachel Ruysch’s work was much sought after and she established herself as a court painter to Johann Wilhelm and Elector Palatine.

My current work is perhaps closer to Dali’s 'Nature Morte Vivante' (living still life) replacing the atoms that fascinated him with bits, bytes and binary code. It is part of my imagining a living afterlife where the code may rearrange, regenerate or be corrupted.