AN INTERVIEW WITH MULTIMEDIA ARTIST GRAHAM FINK BY DAISY FINCH
"If someone takes my work and plays with it, I don’t care. Once something is out in the world, it becomes part of culture’s melting pot.”
Over the years, Graham Fink has contributed a lot to this cultural conglomeration. He’s lead adverts for British Airways and Playstation, grown to be one of the world’s most awarded international creative directors and recently developed a tracking software that allows him to draw using just his eyes — which has subsequently turned the ears of media outlets and art fanatics alike. Now, the multimedia artist and photographer is looking to AI for inspiration.
But Fink isn’t content to sit back and let the tech do the work for him. Instead, it’s become a “creative partner”, feeding back distorted, expanded versions of his own work, which have challenged him to give in to a looser artistic expression. “When I’m painting or drawing, I’m not trying to control everything,” Fink explains. “I like semi-control — I act more like a guiding hand, while time, material and chance do their work.” This is exactly what drew the artist to AI in the first instance. “It sits in the same territory,” he says, adding that it behaves like “an intelligent form of chance”. The result is a pseudo-conversation between Fink’s own creativity and the “strange gifts” AI brings in its hallucinations.
Primarily, the painter and photographer has brought AI into his ever-growing portfolio around ‘pareidolia’. Fink describes the phenomenon as “the way a face suddenly appears in a wall, a pavement slab, the moon, [or] a bit of toast”. “I’ve photographed thousands of these ‘faces’,” he says. “And I keep coming back to the same question: why does the mind insist on finding a human presence in dead matter?”
These patterns are processed, attacked and re-processed through a combination of Fink’s personal instincts and the varied results of generative AI in a feedback loop of creation. “I take that output back into the studio,” he explains. “I’ll edit, print, overpaint, re-photograph, crop, damage it, push it.” Then, after bringing in this human touch, he feeds it back into the AI loop.
“[It’s] not AI replacing the work,” Fink affirms, “but AI extending the experimentation and accelerating the number of ‘accidents’ I can interrogate. I make it work very hard.”
Daisy Finch: Can you explain the process of generating your portraits, flowers and photopaintings, and the inspiration behind them?
Graham Fink: The portraits are my ongoing attempt to make an image that feels human but not conventional. A portrait can be built out of marks and fractures and still feel like somebody you know.
Recently, I’ve been feeling quite positive, so I’ve been leaning into brighter colours and playing with flowers. I think we need that right now, in these dark, crazy times. If you stare long enough, they start producing faces. Petals become mouths. Shadows become eyes. It’s not sentimentality — it’s perception. Flowers are basically a Rorschach test in nature.
The photopaintings are where it gets properly hybrid. A piece might start as a photo of a flower, a painting, or an AI output. Then I’ll mess with it: re-print it, paint over it, scribble on it, scratch it up, tear it, tape it back together, then re-photograph it. After that I might throw it back into AI to see what it does with the damage. So it’s a loop: real world, AI, real world. Each pass twists it into something new. The point isn’t complexity for its own sake — it’s to escape the obvious and get to an image that feels unfamiliar and fresh.
DF: What noticeable differences or similarities do you often catch between your work and those generated by AI?
GF: I often paint — for real — with a lot of paint, big brushes and [in] a very loose style. When the AI is trained or guided by that material, it can reflect it back in surprising ways. It can suggest structures and distortions that would take me weeks to stumble into, if I ever got there at all. I believe that, over time, it’s slowly turning us into a different kind of species. It’s rewiring our brains. Re-educating us. It’s making us behave in different ways. And that’s something I find fascinating. So I want to explore what we can do together through my art.
DF: There’s an intentionality and containment in your works that the AI examples don’t have. Is knowing when to hold back uniquely human, or simply the next step for generative AI?
GF: I’m not consciously trying to hold back. If anything, I’m trying to let go. Sometimes I’ll even paint blind, just to bypass taste and control. But yes, I do have a sense of ‘done’. You can feel when the image has enough life. With AI that’s harder, because it can keep generating endlessly. It can produce a hundred variations in seconds, and most of them are slop. So the human role becomes editing and creative direction — knowing what matters, what has presence, what has energy. You have to push it and then know when to stop.
AI will get better at restraint, no doubt. But the deeper question is: restraint according to what? Taste is not neutral. Final form is a human judgment, and I’m not convinced we should outsource that completely.
DF: How do you navigate AI technologies as an artist, in terms of copyright, ethical debates and creative expression?
GF: My view might not be popular, but I think we need to be honest about how creativity has always worked. From birth, we absorb a world of influences. We build an internal database without asking permission, then we remix it and call it ours. Even photography is like this. We use a camera we didn’t invent, a lens design that comes from decades of other people’s work. We make choices, yes, and the choices matter. But we are never creating in a vacuum. I hear so many times people say, ‘That is mine!’ But is it really? The argument is how we create fair systems around it. Credit. Consent. Compensation. Transparency. That’s where the real debate should live.
"AI is slowly turning us into a different kind of species. It’s rewiring our brains.”
DF: Do you have personal boundaries regarding AI systems trained on external data, or other artists using your work to produce AI versions?
GF: I’ve always been interested in pushing into unexplored places, and boundaries are often just man-made lines drawn for comfort. I downloaded one of those tools that checks whether your images have been used, and I remember thinking, ‘If none of mine had been touched, I’d be oddly disappointed.’ It would mean it made no impact.
DF: How do you think AI will affect artists and the arts industry going forward?
GF: It’s going to change the surface of culture fast. The positive is obvious: access, experimentation, new tools for people who were previously locked out by training, money or gatekeeping. And beyond art, it will help in science, medicine and discovery. I’m optimistic there.
The negative is also obvious. Homogenisation. Misinformation. Cheap imitation. The temptation to accept the first decent image instead of pushing for something true. I’m also aware AI can be deeply annoying in everyday life. Nothing makes you question the future like arguing with an algorithm while trying to fill out a form.
But creatively, we are at the start of a new movement and we don’t have a name for it yet. I’ve exhibited within digital art contexts before, especially with my ‘eye drawings’ — drawing portraits live using only my eyes via an eye tracker and custom software. Being in that world, watching what other artists are attempting, you can feel something forming in that space.
DF: What does your next project or series focus on, and will you continue to experiment with AI?
GF: This current body of work is moving towards an exhibition that puts the handmade and the machine-made in the same room, properly. Not as a gimmick, but as a conversation. I want to take older work from five or even 10 years ago and rework it through AI, then pull it back into the studio again. The point is not to upgrade it. The point is to discover new versions of it, like finding hidden doors inside something you thought you already knew.
You could call it Aivolution Art, a continual experiment where the work is never quite finished because the tools and the dialogue keep changing. Paul Klee talked about taking a line for a walk. I’m taking AI for a walk. Let’s see where we end up.
Images courtesy of Graham Fink
