Nuggets of Marzipan is a show that pushes the boundaries of traditional art creation. It is a unique collaboration between Jill McVarish and Chris Minnick, exploring the intersection of fine art, literature, and technology—specifically, artificial intelligence. The paintings in this exhibition, born from a work of fiction, involve three creative minds if you count the fictional one—or maybe four if you count artificial intelligence. In this series, Jill recreates images from the mind of fictional painter Phillip P. Marzipan III, a character who appears in the novel Music for Losers by Chris Minnick. In a tale involving a tycoon, a chimpanzee, and an anarchist in the early 20th century, Marzipan is a painter with an over-inflated sense of his importance and a penchant for Jello, Caravaggio, and cats.

The paintings began as ideas generated by an AI chatbot trained by Chris on the text of his novel. He instructed the program to act as the voice of the Marzipan character and create images of paintings in Marzipan’s bombastic style. An astounding and often hilarious series of images emerged. Inspired by the AI suggestions, Jill painted her own interpretations in her signature style. The resulting paintings are narrative tableaux with playful allusions to art history mixed with tropes from contemporary culture. In an endless loop of audacious exploration, Jill ventured through the worlds of fiction and artificial intelligence to find herself at the heart of creation all along.