"One Thousand Elegies" is a very-long-form AI collection. One thousand editions of variable prompt-based, raw AI paintings.

This project — both the individual pieces and the collective whole — is a personal attempt to express my pain, guilt, empathy, confusion ... and the thousand other inexpressible emotions I feel when I look helplessly at the inhumane violence taking place in the world today. It is an epic; intentionally grand in scale, diverse, complex, abstract, messy, and contradictory.

In these works I'm channeling some of my favorite painters from all periods of art history, from Pontormo to Soutine, Sonia Delaunay to Richard Diebenkorn, El Greco to Bill Traylor, Alice Neel to Goya, from Franz Kline to Amy Sillman ... and of course there's Robert Motherwell's haunting and heroic "Elegy to the Spanish Republic" series of paintings in the mix.

But this isn't just an exercise in remixing art history, it's more about my own efforts to make new paintings that feel new and private and deeply personal to me, while using samples from these artists that I know and love as my toolkit.

This project is also a continuation of what I really commenced with my collection "Onism," where I felt that I could make all the paintings I wish I'd made but never did. Where I could start to almost conceptualize infinite possibilities — infinite possible outcomes, infinite possible selves.

And of course it's about the perplexing idea that these digital images that I've created at arm's length via AI, can feel so expressive and imbued with emotion.

I also keep coming back to this poem, "The Children's Elegy," by Muriel Rukeyser

Yes, I have seen their eyes. In peaceful gardens the dark flowers now are always children's eyes, full-colored, haunted as evening under fires showered from the air of a burning country.

Shallow-featured children under trees look up among green shadows of the leaves. The angel, flaming, offers—in his hands all is given and he does not change. The child changes and takes. All is given. He makes and changes. The angel stands.

A flame over the tree. Night calling in the cloud. And shadow among winds. Where does the darkness lie? It comes out of the person, says the child. A shadow tied and alive, trying to be.

Emil Corsillo One Thousand Elegies Long-Form AI via EmProps OpenStudio Beta 2304 x 3456 PNG November 17, 2023