About the Artist & the Work LYN BELISLE

Like every Enso Circle Resident, Michelle and I set a personal goal for the twelve-week term and work alongside the Resident fellow artists as part of the community. This practice ensures that we are not just the Circle “leaders,” but are empathetic participants in the process.

My focus this term has been a quiet and personal exploration of AI technology as it defines and interprets my own body of work in clay and assemblage. I hace used Midjourney as my chosen AI tool.

The top example shows an interpretation of one of my figurative sculptures. The original is on the left, the AI result is on the right. The AI interpretation brings a strange kind of two-dimensional implied narrative to the original work.

A similar thing happens in the piece on the bottom left. AI “humanizes” my clay shard faces and gives them human emotions and features. The final piece on bottom right is the result of a written prompt that produced the young girl and the rabbit. It’s an intriguing result because there’s something not quite right about it despite its realism.

AI is a remarkable artist’s tool for anaylsis and self-critique. As artists, we comment on society and community. Exploration is in our DNA. I have come to no formal conslusion about the uses of AI as a tool, but the questions it has raised for me over the past twelve weeks have expanded my thoughts about the definitions of what “art” is. It’s a profound experience.

HOW WE CREATE IS A VARIED AS WHERE WE CREATE. HERE ARE SOME STUDIO PHOTOS FROM ENSO CIRCLE RESIDENTS.

Congratulations to the Residents of the Enso Circle for an excellent exhibit! We are so grateful to you for your creativity, courage, and diversity!

Michelle Belto is a multi-faceted artist and teacher, whose work as an artist, educator and author spans more than forty years, three continents and multiple publications. She holds degrees and certifications in Fine Art, Theater and Expressive Arts. Michelle’s teaching schedule includes instruction in her signature work with paper and wax (Wax and Paper Workshop, Northlight Press 2012) and her life’s work developing an insightful process for deciphering meaning and purpose from the art we create. Her work is in private, corporate and museum collections. Michelle is a R&F Teir Instructor for R&F Paints and an adjunct faculty at Southwest School of Art where she teaches a variety of encaustic painting courses.

Lyn Belisle is a multidisciplinary artist embracing encaustic painting, earthenware, digital imagery, sculpture, textiles and found objects. Her artwork gives expression to her quest to discover and connect synchronistic shards of meaning through collage and assemblage. She teaches mixed-media workshops at Lyn Belisle Studio in San Antonio, and also teaches nationally, most recently in Santa Fe, Provincetown, Washington State, and Taos. Her online workshops and ebooks cover an array of topics for all levels. Her signature media are earthenware, paper and fiber. She recently retired from the faculty in the Computer Science Department at Trinity University to work full time at her studio.