Anonymous figures peer out from the canvases and panels adorning the walls in Drury Bynum’s studio. Some seem to observe the viewer through various optical instruments while others remain partially hidden, the tops of their heads concealed behind voluminous collaged headdresses. Drury Bynum himself is also concealed. He wears a set of VR goggles; fully engaged in a process informed by his years as a trained artist and the burgeoning worlds of AI and wearable tech.
“When I started seeing Midjourney / DALL-E 3 stuff, I was terrified. I thought it was the end of illustration, the end of design… and then a friend of mine started showing it to me, and I input some pictures of my old paintings. It became a very exciting way of iterating on an idea. So these figures started appearing, and I was like, ‘oh shit… off to the races.’”
“A lot of these paintings are several different AI-generated images layered on top of one another. I can send my imagery to a website, access that website through the VR goggles, and I can grab them and position them anywhere I want. So I kind of put them right in front of the painting, and then I can trace parts of that image, layer another image on top, and do the same thing.”
Drury generates thousands of images, using paint, charcoal, and collage to create complex, mixed media works which are somehow both distinctly human and otherworldly.
“I was listening to a lot of near-death experiences, and they’re all fascinating. A lot of them describe meeting beings… One or two of them describe being told by these beings that their time on earth is something they volunteered for; that humans are the universe trying to understand itself through our experience… So. I’m thinking, like, who’s watching us? And I invented these characters— like artists from another dimension. The story is they’re observing us and also recording what we’re doing. So, one of them is the angel figure and the other is the archivist.”
A Maryland Institute College of Art graduate, Drury balances two sides of himself in his creative process.
“I’m like two different painters. I’m a realist painter. I love painting figures and landscapes and buildings. The other part is the mixed media which is a lot of collage, ripping, pasting, destroying. So, I’m trying to reconcile both those people in each of these paintings.”
At a time when the debate about AI in the arts is reaching a fevered pitch, Drury is pushing the medium forward; blending it with his own creative skills and finding ways to take AI beyond the digital space.
“AI needs artists to shape it, to guide it, to create workflows, and to use it. It’s so formulaic now, and every once in awhile you’ll see something that’s like, ‘Whoa! What is that?’ And it’s some creative director who’s experimenting and doing really, really cool stuff. So [AI] needs that.”
