Queer artists all through historical past, and even now, have been coerced to censor themselves, to take away something besides the faintest traces of queerness from their works. Which means that Impressionist work of homosexual males are usually a product of creativeness as a substitute of actuality. However an opportunity encounter with such a portray, all due to an artifact current in Steady Diffusion 1.5, inspired ClownVamp to discover. Whereas contemplating fatherhood as a topic, he prompted the software for a picture of a father and a son, however due to an unanticipated twinning impact, an artifact of early AI techniques, the end result included not one dad, however two.
“I had this bizarre mind glitch second the place I used to be identical to, effectively, I’m this type of Impressionist piece of artwork and unexpectedly, by some means the machine made it tremendous homosexual,” he informed me. “I, as a homosexual man, haven’t seen a lot of these visuals at museums, and this tremendous futuristic software is rewiring the previous for me, and displaying each what might have been however what was additionally misplaced.”
With “Chester Charles,” ClownVamp needed to set off that very same mind glitch he skilled when he noticed the Steady Diffusion picture, however this time, in his viewers. The artworks of Chester Charles casually depict homosexual individuals, homosexual love, homosexual sexuality, and homosexual experiences, and, whereas juxtaposed with an Impressionist model, are meant to make the viewer take pause, offering a queer expertise (in each the literal and theoretical sense); whereas they observe one thing as acquainted as certainly one of historical past’s most recognizable actions in portray, in addition they are confronted with one thing surprising, one thing that makes them query the legitimacy of artwork historical past. Whose work was being suppressed? Whose artwork by no means acquired recognition past small, trusted circles of their time?
ClownVamp goes even additional than merely giving Chester a physique of labor; he additionally imbues that work with a story arc. After we spoke, defined that the present begins with a really conventional Impressionist portray of a shirtless man–not explicitly homosexual, however actually subtextually. Then, as his profession progresses, the artworks stay historically Impressionistic, however develop into more and more visibly queer, depicting “these items that aren’t inside that type of conventional cognitive body,” as ClownVamp places it. Chester’s artwork additionally finally comes to vary. He describes Chester’s later work as looser, extra colourful, and extra summary, utilizing a extra vivid palate and taking extra dangers in his art work. “I assumed should you went again in time and also you had been capable of take away the self-censorship, that’s type of what we’d have seen in an artist’s profession.”
