Art is something that can be highly inspired by the future, and one such artist who was working on things never considered before was da Vinci. Perhaps one of his biggest examples of looking at art in a new way was his Vitruvian Man seen below.
This image is perhaps one that shows how greatly art can evolve over time and how art needs to change and evolve in order to capture people's attention and love.
One artist who knows a lot about evolving over the years is Michael Godard. Originally he started off with painting landscapes under an alias. He then became "The Flower Guy" painting a lot of different flowers like daisies, where the image would be the flower of a single plant, often with some type of bug on a petal. These bugs were often ladybugs, bees, or dragonflies. Then he became "The Olive Guy" painting olives in insane situations on a black background. One of my favorites is him painting olives in a rock band. This painting is called Party Like A Rock Star and is seen below.
He has since evolved more to including elaborate backgrounds and scenery behind the olives, sometimes even forgoing the olives completely to make a compelling scene. Godard is an artist that very much understands the need to change and consider any new technologies that could change the art world.
So what does Michael Godard have to do with Leonardo da Vinci? Interestingly, Godard created a "collaboration" with da Vinci through the use of AI. He would create his own subject matters, like the Batmobile and a piano, in the style of da Vinci. It is normally at this point in the article that I present to you paintings, but I thought I would take a different approach for this article where instead I present to you a video from Michael Godard himself, talking about this series. In this video you will see him talking about the series and also see several paintings in the series along with some close-ups of the paintings.
I actually had the pleasure of listening to Godard talk about this series of paintings. In particular he spoke about some of the hand embellishments he includes on the painting. One interesting factoid he told us is that every version will turn out a bit different. The embellishments may be in slightly different places or in slightly different colors. When asked by someone why the different colors, Godard laughed. He told us that he wished he could say it was for some profound reason, but the truth was that either the original color wasn't sharp enough and he was too lazy to go across the room to the sharpener or he already had the other color in hand and just decided to continue with it. Either way, this series came out very interesting looking and shows just how art may evolve.
So what do you think of this series? See you all in the next issue.