The work is not made by typing a prompt. It begins with my own materials and my own eye: macro photography of pigment under load, paint and acrylic mediums worked by hand, and generative iteration used as one tool among several, on those pieces where it earns its place. The short answer is that a given piece passes through several of these states before it is finished, and none of the three words alone catches the whole of it. What none of them catch at all is the why, and the why comes down to how I see colour.
Where it starts: with the eye
I am red-green colourblind. Colour reaches me as energy before it reaches me as fact. The mid-tones of red and green sit close together for my eye, the subtle steps between near hues collapse, and so I have learned to work from contrast, value, and structural weight, the parts of the spectrum that stay reliable. I call this way of composing chromatic pressure: building through intensity and contrast rather than accurate hue. How a colourblind eye arrives at colour, and what chromatic pressure means in full, sits in how a colourblind artist sees colour.
This is the part of the "is it AI" question that actually matters. The work is led by a way of seeing that no model has. A prompt cannot decide where the contrast needs to lock, because that decision comes from a colourblind eye taking larger leaps across the spectrum than a colour-accurate one would. The tools change across a piece. The eye driving them does not.
The process
My practice moves in cycles rather than a straight line. I shift from physical materials to generative systems to digital precision and back again, carrying fragments of earlier works forward into new ones. The steps recur and reorder. A given piece rarely uses every stage, and not every work closes the same way.
Physical material is often where a piece begins. Paint, pigment, acrylic grounds, gels, and pouring mediums, worked by hand on paper or board. This is where the surface gets its texture, and where colour goes on at the intensity my eye needs.
Macro photography comes in close, under load, at a scale where the material stops looking like paint and starts looking like terrain. These macro studies are raw image material, drawn from my own hand-made surfaces rather than from a stock library or a model.
Where generative iteration comes in, some processes pass image fragments through generative systems and code. It is a way of recombining material I have already made, the way a printmaker might re-expose a plate. It iterates; it does not author. I steer it by eye and discard most of what it returns. Many works use none of this stage at all.
Digital precision holds the composition together. The piece is assembled and corrected on screen, where I can hold contrast and value relationships exactly. For a colourblind artist this stage is less about colour-picking and more about protecting the structural decisions the work depends on.
Many works close as a single archival pigment print, fine droplets of lightfast pigment laid onto conservation-grade paper or canvas. For those works the print is not a reproduction of some separate "real" original. The print is the resolved object, the place the whole loop lands. That print is made at a shared professional workshop; the look inside the KKV Printshop where the editions are made shows the physical end of it.
So is it real art, or is it AI
It is real art. Led, decided, and resolved by an artist, using a set of tools that happens to include generative systems on some pieces and not on others, the way it includes paint, a camera, and a printer.
The line I hold is authorship. A prompt-to-output workflow hands the decisions to the model: you describe, it composes, you accept. That is not how any of this is made. Here the model never composes from a blank slate and never has the final say. It is given material I made, pointed by a perception it does not share, and overruled constantly. The friction that makes the work interesting comes from exactly that tension, between machine precision and human shortcoming, and I keep it rather than smoothing it away.
If it helps, think of the comparison most people already accept. A photographer who develops a digital file is still a photographer; the software did not take the picture. A printmaker who runs a printer is still a printmaker; the printer did not draw the image. The tool takes part. It does not take over.
Why these particular steps
A general process article can list the steps. It cannot tell you why these particular steps, and that is the part worth keeping. Because mid-spectrum hue is unreliable for my eye, accurate colour was never going to be the foundation of the work. So I built the practice on the things I can trust completely: contrast, value, light, the blue-yellow axis, and the physical weight of a surface. Human colour vision runs on opposing pairs, red against green and blue against yellow, and mine sits on that first pair, so I compose around the channels that stay steady.
Each tool in the loop earns its place by serving that. Hand-worked pigment gives me intensity I can feel rather than measure. Macro photography lets me find structure inside the material. Generative iteration, used sparingly, throws up recombinations I would not have reached by hand, which I then judge by contrast rather than by hue. Digital composition lets me hold those contrast relationships precisely. And when a work closes as an archival pigment print, the pigment sits on the paper as solid, lightfast particles and holds the loaded contrast the work is built on. None of that is a workaround for a limitation. It is the practice the perception produced.
How the work is finished and what form it takes
A piece from the atelier is an original artwork. Many close as an archival pigment print: pigment inks on conservation-grade paper or canvas, made to hold their colour and contrast for a lifetime when kept out of direct sun and behind UV-filtering glazing. The hand-embellished unique works carry two finishing layers over the pigment ink on German Etching. An acrylic pouring medium goes down first, drying clear and locking the surface, then a UV-resistant varnish goes over it; those works are also mounted on Dibond. The open and limited editions are pigment on acid-free paper, finished by the paper itself.
Some of the works are one-of-one: a single physical piece with no edition behind it. Others are editioned, open or limited. Each carries the artist's signature; the limited editions are numbered within a set run. Where an edition has closed, it stays a closed record; I do not reopen or reprint it. None of these are mass-produced posters. Each is the resolved end of a process that started with pigment and an eye that sees colour as pressure.