Why Our Images Feel Different
The Creative Process
I have been collecting art for more than thirty years.
I have founded companies, traded stocks, bought and sold real estate, and travelled the world. Throughout all of this, art was always there. Not at the center of my life, more as a passion.
Over the years, I have seen thousands of artworks in galleries, museums, hotels, private homes, and art fairs. Many I admired. Most I forgot. Some I bought.
I have never understood why people hang pictures on their walls that they stop noticing after three days. For me, an image has to evoke something. It needs energy, personality, an inner strength.
Creative work has always been a mixture of ideas, experimentation, chance, and selection. Many artists have confirmed this belief to me. Artificial intelligence did not invent that process. It merely accelerated it.
When the first AI image generators appeared, my reaction was not that a machine was creating art.
Instead, I felt as if I had been given a new creative tool. For the first time, I could pursue an idea, explore hundreds of variations, change direction, and investigate paths within a few hours that would previously have taken weeks or months.
Today, I use artificial intelligence as a creative tool.
An idea produces the first drafts. Most of them are discarded immediately. Others contain something that interests me: a mood, an expression, or a hint of the strength I am looking for.
From there, a process often begins that can take a long time. I change instructions, follow new directions, discard ideas again, start over, and develop the image step by step.
Sometimes this results in twenty versions, sometimes hundreds. Often I let a project rest for several weeks before returning to it.
Technology provides possibilities. Which of those possibilities are worth pursuing is decided by my eye, my taste, and ultimately by the question I ask myself for every image:
Would I hang this picture on my own wall?
In that sense, every image is also a part of my own journey. It reflects my experience as a collector, my enjoyment of creating, and my personal taste.
I look for variety and depth, not for a single formula that can be repeated over and over again.
Or, as ChatGPT recently put it:
I am looking for images that have something to them.
And that is exactly what I hope to share: not a perfect theory, but images that are meant to move people. Perhaps quietly, perhaps powerfully. But always genuinely.
