Juneteenth

A happy Juneteenth to all my African-American friends. While I’m enjoying my day off and using it to catch some rest, many in the United States who are incarcerated are forced to perform essentially slave labor for the cancerous for-profit prison industrial complex. For more background on this. The Punishment Clause is a threat to the rights of all citizens of this country, so I’m taking this holiday as an opportunity to remember that.

I did also catch some live music today, a zydeco show that I took my daughter to. Just another nice reminder of the beautiful diversity of our city and country, as Creole culture was on prominent display. There are a lot of good shows coming up that I hope to see with my daughter this year; the Juneteenth one on Saturday should be fun.

I started rereading The Artist’s Guide, which is a pretty pragmatic approach to just achieving your goals as an artist. I have a lot of work still to do outside of just creating pieces. I had started reading it and planning this website as a pandemic project back in the Spring of 2020, and life since then has been much more hectic than it ever was before the pandemic, so it’s been challenging to stay with it. I’d recommend the book if you’re trying to become a professional artist. I wouldn’t mind following in my mother’s footsteps in some ways. Speaking of which, I hope to launch a second website in the coming years to display and sell prints of my mother’s art. Let me know if you’re at all interested in that, because it will take a lot of work.

6/19/25

-PGB

This ain’t a blog post

I’m on vacation and driving through multiple states for a family wedding. But I have plans for when I get back home in a few days. Mostly gardening and yardwork. The website is coming along. I’ll be able to officially share it with my followers soon. When I’m no longer spending most of my free time on it, I’ll have time for other things like making music, doing prompts from The Artist’s Guide, a book I inherited from my mother, and planning my next big piece. I had tried to complete my last piece in under a year and ended up spending close to two years on it as a result of having a kid. This next piece will have no such deadlines. It will be another larger format piece (16” x 20” is about as large as I can manage these days,) and a recreation of my 2013 piece Valkyries and Hornets, which followed the simple rule of light colors for large shapes and dark colors for small shapes. I have a lot more pencils now than I had then, so first I’ll go through them and try to sort them into the smoothest light-dark gradient I can make. Then I’ll blow undiluted ink on my paper. And then I’ll begin the process of coloring in the biggest shapes with the lightest colors and progress from there until the piece is fully colored in. Anyway, this is turning into a blog post, so I gotta go.

6/11/25
-PGB

Thoughts on AI

Here is an article that elucidates a lot of the thoughts and opinions I’ve had on all this.
My main issues with the AI/LLM scheme boil down to:

• Environmental impact: the energy and water usage of this technology is beyond irresponsible. As it’s used more often by more and more people, I want those people to consider their impact and reconsider if there isn’t already a better way to do what they’re trying to do (there is.)
  More info

• Scraping of human artists’ work without their consent or credit. Generating images, music, text that copies an existing artist’s style and directly competes with the artist for attention. The overall effect this has of reducing art to nothing but pieces of regurgitated content ultimately demeans the human experience in a serious way.

• The megacorporations pushing this into every facet of our lives act without regard to copyright or environmental rules, without regard to basic ethical guidelines or any respect for human creativity. I’m not as concerned that this technology will get good enough at what it does to meaningfully replace workers in a wide variety of sectors as I am that the CEOs who make those decisions will see an easy out and take that opportunity regardless of the quality of the product they get.

As an aside, I hate hearing it referred to as AI. There are better, more accurate, less emotionally-charged terms for it: LLM (Large Language Models,) machine generated content, etc. For the purposes of this post, I would like everyone to at least know what I’m referring to, so I’ll leave the title as is. I hate hearing about how this technology will double in efficiency or power every year or reach AGI (“Artificial General Intelligence,” basically independent thought) within our lifetimes. If that’s going to happen, it won’t be with these current models. I get the feeling these technologies have reached their peak and everything else is just marketing. For more on this.

If you’re reading this and have thoughts that clash with what I’m asserting, write down your thoughts. Don’t go to ChatGPT. Write them down. Send them to me. I’m here, breathing, writing, making art, and this technology causes me and the artists I love grave harm at an alarming pace. Having a conversation will illuminate things for both of us as long as your intentions are good. All this is to say, if you use LLMs, please consider your impact. If your primary output is LLM images or music or something that takes away from human creators, we can just part ways right here as I’m not likely to change your mind, nor you mine.

6/4/25
-PGB

Website published

Just putting a post up here to note that this website is now public. However, it’s not finished. I still need to reduce the filesize on all the images across the site to reduce loading time. And I’m working on fleshing out the print store. Finally, I’ll get everything up on the Other Works page so I can publish that, too. Ooh! And, if the formatting appears weird on your phone screen, let me know. I’m working on that too.

My art-only Instagram page is up now, and I’m planning my first few posts. My handle there is @patrickgbarrow_art.
I’d like to be able to offer prints for every piece on this site, and originals eventually too, but that will also take some time. If you are interested in something that’s not yet listed in the store, please fill out the contact form and I’ll get on it. Don’t be shy, I’m eager to start fulfilling orders to help support my family.

5/29/25

-PGB