Recently, my colleagues have decided that I am no longer permitted to call myself an illustrator. In their opinion, I am a fraud.
Which is curious, because illustrators, at least where I come from, are not considered artists anyway. That privilege is reserved for those who sign their work in the correct corner.
I learned that lesson the hard way.
Years ago, a gallery accepted my work, only to reject it later when someone discovered I hadn’t signed it on the front.
“There is no room for artists who do not sign their work,” I was told. “The signature determines part of the value.”
I had, in fact, signed everything. On the back.
That, apparently, did not count.
So no, I never claimed to be an artist. Like my colleagues, I work in applied art.
Still, my method is now considered illegitimate. The first to point this out was a valued colleague who creates collages: images of people and the world, torn from fashion magazines and reassembled with glue into something new, carefully balanced and safely within the accepted boundaries of authorship.
To the best of my knowledge, she has never used a pencil, chalk, watercolor, or a Rotring pen.
I, on the other hand, have spent years cross-hatching with that very pen. If all those lines were laid end to end, they would cover more ground than many sovereign nations.
Nor have I ever avoided the wet, unpredictable temperament of watercolor.
And yet I am the fraud.
Because now I take my finest Chinese brush, make a sketch, and feed it into AI with a simple instruction:
Develop this further, preferably in the spirit of the socially conscious artists of the Weimar Republic.
Most of my colleagues have never even heard of the Weimar Republic, let alone that they could produce a sketch with a Chinese brush.
So I withdrew.
To a quiet corner of the internet, where signatures matter less than ideas,
and where I present the one thing that seems to offend them most: a precise, intentional, and entirely unapologetic collaboration between human and machine.
Max van Norden