Artist Profile
INTRODUCING MANEKI NEKO
LITERARY INTERPRETATION – FROM CINDIA
SCENE: THE PEONY GARDEN
This artwork captures an elegant aesthetic that hints back to the time of Art Nouveau and when the grand villa was first conceived. The gilded gold and fanciful flowers lead the way into The Peony Garden of The Spice Temple.
These blooms are layered and drenched in nuance and culture. The impermanence of these delicate flowers also shows how each phase within a life has its beauty and just how fragile and precious our time is.
The passage below represents The Peony Garden’s inception and its endurance over decades.
“A flock of birds and their cheerful chorus drew her attention to a cluster of colorful peonies. It was this time of the year when they appeared in all their glory. She noted colors ranging from shades of pearly white or soft peach to mysterious tones of deep vermilion or black velvet. Their feather-like petals, teased by a springtime breeze, danced for her in the morning light as she leaned in to smell their fragrance. Their first high note of delicate rose was quickly overcome by a subtle shade of woodsy musk, foretelling that the peony’s life was one of great beauty, but also short-lived.”
ARTIST’S INTERPRETATION OF EPHEMERA
This piece was created especially for the passage in Cindia’s book about an encounter with peonies. It is the result of an exploration of hundreds of iterations in the AI tool Midjourney, beginning with a blend of several pieces of Maneki’s previous work and refined through further prompting and variations. Several of the best results were then collaged in Photoshop to achieve the composition desired and that result then further enhanced with details over several iterations of prompts in Stable Diffusion. After editing color and fine details of the last result in Photoshop, the piece was rescaled to it’s final size with Topaz Gigapixel.
BIOGRAPHY OF MANEKI NEKO
Maneki Neko is an AI-facilitated artist who lives in Seattle.
She creates intricate, colorful, detail-rich art in a style she calls “Anti-minimalism”. Sometimes leaning towards the abstract or surrealism, her work often features flowers or inspirational women from folklore.
Maneki’s art is inspired from her need to find moments of peace from the many troubles of modern life through the pleasant distraction of exploring an image full of intriguing details. For the viewers of her pieces, she has one major goal: to entice them to simply stop and stare for a while.
Maneki’s work has been exhibited in Rome, Liverpool, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seattle, Toronto, Amsterdam, Manila, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, featured on OpenSea’s front page and has been collected by more than 400 people since she minted her first NFT in February, 2022.
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