a familiar essay from student Norah Marstall
As soon as I tumble from bed in the morning, I run through several habits that get my day going. After a wheezy walk or a hurried breakfast, I scramble upstairs for one particular habit. A bookstand really meant for cookbooks sits on my bookshelf. I heave a Yoshitaka Amano art-book off this book stand and stagger into my pink armchair. Sliding around on pillows, I begin turning the art-book’s glossy pages. Beautiful art flies before my eyes—pictures of colossal dragons, magnificent cities, grotesque monsters, alluring villains, and adorable moogles. All these are things you might come across on an epic, Final Fantasy journey.
There is another journey besides those depicted in this Final Fantasy collection. When someone looks at a picture, he makes a discovery. The artist himself discovers his art—as he’s drawing it, or even when it’s finished. Amano san’s extravagant and daring pictures for the popular video game series reflect the adventures he had as a creator. It must have been fun to sketch these unique, colorful characters for the first time, then to keep recreating them—every time reintroducing yourself to that particular characters’ whims, prejudices, faults, etc. Although many people collaborated and will collaborate to create Final Fantasy casts, Amano must have discovered the characters for himself in the way he drew them. This is because brainstorming about a character is very different than drawing them.
Amano’s concept art is the discovery of a world. Because a drawing often turns into something we weren’t expecting, art is not something you just construct and manipulate. Our mind and our hands coordinate to form universes we didn’t even know we wanted to visit.
Art is full of lost, bittersweet potentialities. These are the ideas we had in our head for a drawing that turn into something very different on paper. These changes can be frustrating, inspiring, or just surprising. Such potentialities can leave both a sweet and bitter residue on our artistic sense. We’re sad that we lost one world, but happy we found another. I have rarely drawn a picture exactly as I first imagined it in my head.
As I study my art book, I enjoy thinking that the artist put something of himself in these jacked warriors and delicate heroines. Art is living, in the sense that it reflects—if only a speck of—an artist’s soul. Unlike God, who can breathe life into his art, our humble gifts of pictures don’t have eternality, reason, and consciences. But our art has a story that wouldn’t be a story if people didn’t have souls.
Concept art has living potential. When we finish a picture and tell ourselves to stop messing with it, we’ve reached the end of the line. That finished picture is what it is. Concept art is different, because it suggests of potentialities to come. Concept art manifests itself in different ways, like in simple pencil sketches or the multiple versions of a character. Finished art, although it still reflects the soul, is content to be what it is. But concept art is a collection of potentialities, inviting us to continue to discover a world. Potentialities are like paths. They lead us to infant creations that are each unique in its own way.
This is one reason why we can’t mistake AI images for real art. The craftsmanship behind these images is the programming compiled by a brilliant, human mind. The image itself is not craftsmanship—to say nothing of missing fingers and extra limbs. There is no journey, no beginning stroke, and no lost, bittersweet potentialities. An AI picture is senselessly served up out of computer software to meet the required parameters. Whether I would feel the same way if I didn’t know an image was generated before I looked at it, I feel a stony lack of depth in AI pictures. The image is a wall, and not a curtain that stands between me and a fellow human with artistic tendencies. Any drawing not made by a sentient, reasonable being is meaningless. This is why generated AI “art” isn’t art.
The reason I prop a different page of art on my stand every day is so that when I walk into my room, I can enjoy even the quickest glance at a living piece of art.
