David Salle Why artists are training AI on their own work

By Duncan Ballantyne Way

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American painter David Salle, in contrast, was attracted less by the metaphysical possibilities of AI than by its capacity to dismantle and recombine pictorial elements, offering new ways of seeing his earlier work. He was initially drawn to the technology’s ability to recognize visual similarities and differences – a process he saw as closely related to his own approach to composition. The way it scans visual phenomena, Salle explains, ‘is more or less what the human eye does.’

Using his ‘Pastorals’ series of paintings (1999-2001) as a starting point, Salle began experimenting with a version of the AI model Stable Diffusion customized with the help of engineer Grant Davis, to generate unexpected new arrangements from elements of his original compositions. ‘The model seemed to have a will toward deconstruction and reconstruction,’ Salle continues, ‘which is really my bailiwick.’ These experiments formed the basis for his ‘New Pastorals’ (2024-), a series in which digitally generated compositions are printed onto canvas before being worked over in oil paint by the artist. The resulting paintings combine distorted mountain landscapes, fragmented bodies, isolated items of clothing, and even a turbine-sun, with their conflicting scales and perspectives disrupting any coherent sense of space.

‘It allowed me to reimagine the pictorial landscape,’ he explains. The machine disrupted the first stage of Salle’s compositional process, introducing pictorial relationships he might never have arrived at himself. In doing so, he could challenge his own conventions while maintaining control over the finished painting. ‘I’m not interested in digital art for its own sake,’ he explains, ‘what caught my attention was how the tool functions from a fine art perspective, what it could be pushed to do.’