Meet Maria Bort – the illustrator and painter making magic with generative ai

Maria Bort is a London-based mixed-media artist and illustrator with a strong graphic design background. She works in a variety of techniques from cyanotype and etching, to painting and textile art. Maria now splits her time between her graphic design job and creating her own art. She told us about the path that led to her uniquely expressive style, and how exactly.ai is helping her focus even more time on the work she cares about most.

I grew up in Siberia and have been drawing since childhood. After school, I moved to St. Petersburg where I studied graphic design. However, due to some features of Russian higher education, we had many painting and drawing classes. Surprisingly, these classes greatly influenced my current practice. A few years ago, my partner and I relocated to the UK. Here, I began to delve deeper into the art field, focusing on creating textile art, paintings, working with various printing techniques, and immersing myself in illustration. Additionally, I attended several courses at the Royal Drawing School, which transformed my practice and deepened my artistic language.

Now I work as a graphic designer, but it’s not my main focus. Painting and drawing are a bigger part of my life. In terms of my process, I usually paint and then scan my work and then draw on top of these scans on my iPad or using Photoshop, to add more details, more sensibility, more… feelings, I would say. For me, it's not reworking, but “up-working”.

In St. Petersburg, I lived and studied near the Hermitage museum. During my lunch breaks, and on weekends, I used to go to the third floor where the works of Henri Matisse were displayed. Matisse's use of colours, shapes and manipulation of space deeply resonated with me, and continues to influence my artistic practice. I particularly like Matisse’s cutouts; how he worked with shapes. They’re so unique and sensitive. It seems like he didn’t just create them – he actually saw the world like that. Talking about old masters, I need to mention Marc Chagall. His stories – his light and airy representations of animals, people and villages – left a great mark on my understanding of painting. I'm not very strong or super knowledgeable on modern art, but if I could choose a person to meet in real life, it would definitely be David Hockney. I could spend hours repeating the lines of his beautiful drawings and etchings.

For me, generative AI programmes are tools. It’s like Microsoft Word or Photoshop – it’s something you can use for your purposes. It could offer inspiration, or maybe it will just give you more free time for other stuff. That’s what I really like about exactly.ai. For me, checking how different ideas and approaches might look is a long and complicated process. Having a model that has been trained on my art means now I can see how it might look in just five minutes and decide if the idea will work or not. As a fun addition, exactly.ai sometimes creates random details on pictures that can be used separately. For me, it’s magic.

The blue series I created started as a cyanotype, that was loaded into a model. You create cyanotypes by putting a solution onto paper, then leaving it in the sun with some cutouts. When it dries you have an image. In this case, the hallucinations from the model look absolutely stunning! The model has added realistic floral fields, which combined with the cutouts look like Van Gogh's ‘Starry Night’ to me.

Another model I trained was based on illustrations created for a children’s book that recreated the sounds of the city. The book was designed to reach a diverse audience, including children and individuals with specific health challenges such as hearing impairments. Understanding that these groups may be more sensitive to sounds than adults, the book aims to normalise different sounds and foster a sense of comfort and acceptance.

I got the idea that the same style might work for the Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling – and this model was created to test this hunch. I really liked the results and I’ve used a few of the images already. Because it tried to copy the original illustrations from my book of sounds, the model even added some words onto the final images, which is so cool

In a few years, the ideal scenario for me would be to work for an illustration agency. I love telling stories but not so much the writing part, so I would love to illustrate someone else’s stories. Collaboration is the best thing about humanity, when two people can help each-other to be better. Looking to the future, I don’t worry about AI impacting creativity negatively. It’s already helped me so much. And from a technical point of view, I don’t believe it will replace the artist. Without the artist to begin with, the model will have nothing to create from. It will be a loop – nothing new will happen.